Image via 'Prevenge'

Pregnancy makes women do strange things. Some begin eating pickles with yogurt. For others, hormones cause fits of crying. But for Ruth, the anti-heroine in director Alice Lowe's first feature Prevenge, pregnancy turns a woman into a serial killer.

An official selection of the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival which just wrapped, Prevenge follows Ruth as her fetus tells her to slaughter all those it deems "selfish bastards." Blending all the best elements of pulp fiction, camp, and cult films, Prevenge feels like a cross between Charlize Theron's Monster and the 1970s cult classic Chatterbox (where the protagonist is a talking vagina). Blending comedy, gore, and taking a noticeable dig at the infantilization of pregnant women, Prevenge was shot in just 11 days in Wales—a breakneck pace for any film crew—let alone a small independent group. Lowe, who pulled triple duty as director, writer, and our lovable psychopath Ruth, was also seven-and-a-half months pregnant during filming. While in Toronto for the festival, she sat down with me (her young baby in tow) to chat about how her film disrupts Hollywood's narrow ideas about roles for women, and why so many men didn't think she could make the film while pregnant.

VICE: Prevenge starts off camp, then it goes into serious issues. What I was most struck by is we're not used to women, especially pregnant women, being like this. We're used to this stereotype or archetype of this motherly, giving thing, and I think this really shakes people's world view.
Lowe: That's exactly what I wanted to do with it, is shake up people's preconceptions of pregnant women. And pregnant women as these soft, harmless things.... It's a theoretical premise, I'm not saying pregnant women would be violent, but that character exists more like a kind of experiment to see how far you can stretch people's sympathies for a character that was gonna do completely unexpected things and was an individual as well. My thing is, people watch Taxi Driver and they all say they love the character of Travis Bickle, even though he's an unlikeable character. And then you see one sort of female character who sleeps with her friend boyfriend, and we're like, "What a bitch, I don't like her." And she didn't even kill anyone! She might have been slightly rude to someone at a party, and we're judging that woman and saying it's an awful depiction of womankind. It doesn't mean that all women are like that. I just wanted to test to see if we could make a female protagonist who makes these kinds of decisions, and we'll go with her. And that almost, teaching the audience that hopefully the character doesn't have to make the expected decisions, but you understand the decisions, even if you don't approve of them.

You can still enjoy watching her you don't have to like her. You don't have to root for what she's doing

You do kind of root for her though.
Well that's good, I hope people do.

...in like a really strange way. And I say that because there's something about the people that she kills, where it's almost like they deserve it. No one deserves to die, but it kind of satisfies our thirst for justice, which is a mindfuck isn't it?
She, in her mind, is right. She is doing the right thing and punishing bad people. And once you realize that about the character, she has her own rules and morality... she's got a code of honour that she's operating by, and she's punishing a bad deed, she thinks, 'These people should have been punished in a court of law and they weren't so I have to do it.' So her and the baby, they think they're doing the right thing. I see her as an anti-superhero, the things that we perceive as weaknesses in women or pregnant women, vulnerability, fragility, hormonal excess, they're super powers to her almost. Turning that into strength from a weakness, people are not used to seeing that at all. So all of those things I wanted to put in there, and she's putting all these people on trial.

I wanted to do that in the film, that you're constantly surprised by what's she's doing and you don't know what tone it takes, the audience are never quite comfortable with what's going to happen next, you don't know what's going to happen tonally. We did loads of that. We worked it through in the editing, it's a low budget film, we don't have millions of pounds to spend on CGI, all the choices and conflicts and horrors you're getting are through the choices we made through editing, sound, music, and tiny facial expression that unnerves you in some way. That's the game I'm trying to play with the audience. You think you're watching a comedy, then there's a cut and suddenly you're watching something horrific. Maybe you're thinking, "Oh god she's a horrible person," but next you're feeling sorry for her. It was an experiment for me. I want to try and give people something that's really refreshing. For me it's new territory, this female narrative.

There were some really great films at TIFF this year that fail the Bechdel test because, if these male characters had been written as women, it wouldn't have changed the narrative or the story or the plot or the characters at all. But if your character had been a man, people would have gotten it. But you flip it on its head, it's a woman, people are like, "I don't know how to deal with this."
It's funny because it shouldn't have to make any difference. As an actress, I often, I've done this a couple of times, I've been sent a script and the female character is in it for two scenes. And she's someone's mum. And that's all the character is. What's her personality? She's someone's mum. "What's her personality?" "Oh she's caring and she's self-sacrificing to her son." And you're like, "Right, she's got no personality basically. She didn't exist until she was a mother." And that annoys me. And you look at the main character and go, "Can I play that character?" And they're like, "Oh that's a man." And I'm like, "Could it be a woman?" And they're like, "Oh we don't have time to do rewrites." And I'm like, "You don't need to rewrite! There is nothing in here that needs to be changed necessarily." But it blows people's minds. So much of it is conditioning.

In the 12th century, Eleanor of Aquitaine rode into battle pregnant and bare-breasted. She outlived both of her husbands who were kings and 11 of her 13 children. And watching this film, I was like, yeah, don't mess with pregnant women.
This is what I'm talking about when people infantilize pregnant women. This woman is about to see a lot of blood and be split open by a baby, I know they're trying to be nice, but if this woman can't cope with the harshness of life, she can't cope with having a baby. When people were worried about me directing—it was more men than women I have to say—I was saying I'm going to direct a film, and people were like, "but you're pregnant." And I'm like, "Yeah I know," and they were like, "Do you think you'll be okay?" In a way, it was out of concern, quite a lot of blokes have children, it was a primal, protective thing where they were like, "What about the baby? Is the baby going to be okay?" And I was like, "Look, women work in fields, women have children in warzones, but me standing with a crew going 'Press record now 'cause I'm going to do a bit of acting' is not exactly the hardest thing. And even if it was, I'm going to have to be looking after a baby, so ...how hard can it be really?"

I love that scene where your victim says to you, "You're insane," and you reply, "I am a working mother."
What was I trying to say with that? I dunno. Maybe the demands that children place upon you, or that society expects you to meet are unrealistic to the point that they can push you to insanity.

I'm really pleased by a lot of the reactions I've had from men watching the film as well. Some people have said to me that they're scared to go home to their pregnant wife. As they should be.

Follow Christine Estima on Twitter.

Photos by Jeff David King via ThroughMyTelescope.com

Looking back, I probably looked like one confusing-ass kid.

Despite my circle of racially diverse friends, I was one of the few kids with an actual multi-ethnic background. To make matters worse, I didn't exactly fit the stereotype of what a "mixed kid" should look like. I didn't have long, flowing curly black hair. My skin was not a banana boat complexion. I was on the chunkier side and had extremely dark, heavy-set eyes. I had thick lips, nappy hair, and mocha-coloured skin to match.

To put it shortly, I was a mono-racial-looking biracial kid.

I was considered an oddity amongst a relatively small group that could bond over loose curl patterns and "less black" features. And amongst that group, I didn't have a single trace of whiteness in my background.

To make matters worse, my sister and I could not look any more different. While my hair defies gravity, she has long, lustrous curly locks that are often an object of envy (for problematic reasons) in the black community. Her skin complexion is slightly lighter than mine. She has thin lips, almond-shaped eyes, and was saved from the cursed thick "African arms" that were so graciously bestowed unto me from our father.

As a minority in a then-growing minority group, it also didn't help that my parents were both minorities in their own respect. My father is a black African from Ghana. My mother is a South American of East-Indian descent from Guyana.

Being raised in the suburbs with a slowly—but steadily—growing multicultural population, getting asked about my ethnicity became part of my daily interactions.

It took me awhile to feel comfortable calling myself mixed-race. I always had this underlying guilty feeling inside that I was somehow abandoning one half of me whenever I chose to identify with one ethnicity. On my mother's side, I was the black cousin. I listened to "black people music" and did "black people things." On my father's side, I was never seen as black enough. I could only understand choice words from my father's indigenous language and because of my mother, was doomed to never being able to fully identify as a "real black woman."

My identity was and still is constantly under scrutiny.

Growing up mixed-race in Toronto for me meant chicken curry and roti on Saturdays, and fufu and soup on Sundays. It meant listening to afrobeats at African parties and dancing to chutney at my cousins' Hindu weddings. It meant rocking the Ghanaian flag at Afrofest and the Guyanese one at Caribana.

It also meant correcting my black friends when they made derogatory comments about Indian people, and having to explain black discrimination to my Indo-Guyanese family members who just didn't get it.

It can be tough choosing which side to identify with (or trying to equally represent both). In my case, finding and owning my identity became a specific crisis because of the history of my background.

There was a time in Guyana when Indians and blacks didn't mix. Land that went to indentured Indian labourers versus freed black slaves in the early 1900s gave way to strong tensions between the ethnic groups. Colonialism benefited off of the British-spun narrative that Afro-Guyanese people were lazy, and Indo-Guyanese folk were greedy, further heightening racial disparity between the two.

In Guyanese, Surinamese, and Trinidadian culture, those of Indian and African descent are referred to as dougla—a term that originated from the Hindi word doogala, which means mixed or many. In northern Indian culture, the word doogala is considered highly pejorative and often associated with terms like bastard or illegitimate.

When I first found this out, the only solace I could find was in the fact that those who do identify as dougla fully own who they are. Melanie Fiona, Vashtie Kola, and Nicki Minaj (to name a few) are all douglas who aren't afraid to represent and wear their heritage proudly.

It's also tough living in a North American society that's become so socialized to the idea that being mixed-race is based on its proximity to whiteness. Stanford University put out a study concluding that in North America (specifically the US), there is a strong racial hierarchy placed on those who identify as half-white based on the higher social status afforded to white Americans. This meant that more people were likely to identify as half-white/half-minority than those whose backgrounds include multiple minorities.

This also meant that more visibility would undoubtedly go to those of a half-caucasian background.

As someone who clearly doesn't fit this description, I constantly felt like I had to defend the fact that I even am mixed in the first place.

In the black community, self-identification politics is a sensitive issue. Mainstream society makes it difficult for us to even want to identify as black in the first place for the very reason that our existence has now become an act of resistance. And for those of multiracial backgrounds, the personal becomes that much more political.

According to race-relations expert and journalist Nadra Nittle, self-identification can be even more problematic with omission.

" a positive thing." says Nittle.

So where does this leave monoracial-looking biracial person today? While the questions, raised eyebrows, or shocked look on people's faces will probably never end, I've found comfort in the fact that although I'm not the only one with an exhaustive identity crisis, my identity is still mine, and mine alone.

Follow Lindsey Addawoo on Twitter.

A NYPD bomb disposal robot handles an unexploded pressure cooker bomb on West 27th Street in New York City. Photo by Lucien Harriot/Getty Images

Some of the various bombs found in New York and New Jersey this weekend were stumbled upon by amateur thieves who may have helped prevent their detonation, DNAinfo reports.

Sources told the publication that on Saturday—when a bomb detonated in Chelsea, Manhattan, injuring 29 people—well-dressed thieves happened upon a suitcase around the corner, on West 27th Street. After they apparently opened up the suitcase to find a bomb inside attached to a cellphone, the men took the explosive out and dumped it in a trash bag before making off with the suitcase.

Authorities believe the thieves inadvertently disabled the explosive when they moved it.

"Who in this world finds a pressure cooker with a phone and just takes the bag?" one law enforcement source joked to DNAInfo. Cops later found the disabled bomb and safely removed it from the area.

Meanwhile, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, late Sunday, a pair of homeless men happened upon an abandoned backpack on top of a trash can. After opening it up, they reportedly found five pipe bombs and dropped the backpack in the middle of the street before notifying local police. A police robot ended up detonating one of those bombs upon investigation—and without any harm done—at about 12:30 AM Monday.

About ten hours later, authorities found suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami in Linden, New Jersey, and took him into custody after a chase and brief shootout.

Read: What We Know So Far About Bombing Suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami

Get the VICE App on iOS and Android.

The first murder I saw online was the decapitation of Nick Berg, an American businessman captured and killed by an Iraqi jihadist group in 2004. The video depicted a handful of men working together to cut his head off. I was in high school at the time. I watched him die.

Since then, there have been a number of deaths broadcast online: Philando Castile. Alton Sterling. David Cawthorne Haines. It's become copacetic to watch someone's murder, and not just in dark corners of the internet. These videos exist undisguised, presented under the guise of relevant "news content." You can find them on Facebook and Twitter, sandwiched between family photos and videos of dogs.

The video of Castile dying on Facebook Live generated approximately three million views within a few hours, instantly provoking public outrage. I watched, too, and afterward, I was certain the video would be removed for violating Facebook's rules on graphic content. After all, Facebook reserves the right to remove explicitly violent content posted to the site. But it turns out there's a loophole—images and videos "of public interest or concern." Only violent images "shared for sadistic pleasure or to celebrate or glorify violence" are removed.

But some experts believe the context doesn't really matter, because whether or not the intentions are good, watching someone die can have real and lasting psychological effects.

"I do not believe the intent of the distributor makes a difference in how traumatic the viewer's response is," Dr. Dion Metzger, a psychiatrist with an expertise in PTSD and trauma from mass media told VICE. "The level of trauma is based on the content of the video and also heightened if the viewer identifies with the victim."

Of course, many will argue that's exactly the point: We're supposed to be traumatized by these kinds of videos because the point is to provoke change. If we're not exposed to injustices in the world—in all their gory detail—how can we begin to change them?

Of all the categories of filmed homicide, civilian-police conflict shootings are at the forefront of this discussion. Between March 2014 and September 2016, there were at least 15 viral videos of police encounters that resulted in death. Presumably, users sharing these videos believe that they're contributing to a cause, and helping to rectify social injustice.

"It's one thing to talk about the injustices, but when people actually see it with their own eyes, that's a whole different ball game," said Metzger. "They are able to empathize with the victim and can advocate stopping the injustice that they witnessed. For this very reason, the exposure of the filmed violence can bring on positive results."

Even still, that doesn't mean they're not traumatic to the people watching them. One study found that some people who repeatedly viewed footage of deadly events—in this case, the Boston Marathon bombings—sustained more trauma and stress than people who had witnessed the events in real life. In another study, which asked participant to view footage from school shootings, suicide bombings, and the attacks on 9/11, 22 percent of participants showed symptoms of PTSD after watching the videos.

"After watching such content, may have problems sleeping and even a level of anxiety—almost mimicking paranoia—that they can also be the victim of such a violent act," said Metzger.

And yet, as Metzger pointed out, people can't seem to look away. "I believe there's a certain shock value to these videos that make them appealing to the masses," she said.

After 9/11, Americans watched an average of eight hours of news coverage of the attacks, much of which was explicit. Those who watched more television coverage also had heightened stress responses and symptoms of trauma.

Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist and former head of the National Coalition On TV Violence, told VICE there's almost an addictive quality to this kind of graphic violence. "Many people tell themselves that they are watching violent news stories to stay informed, but unconsciously they are becoming addicted to the titillation that this violence creates," she said.

To be sure, as horrified as I was after watching the decapitation of Berg in 2004, it didn't stop me from watching similar videos.

Lieberman sees this as a problem. Beyond the psychological consequences to the viewer, our willingness to consume this kind of content has given groups like ISIS a platform to make their point with footage of beheadings and other violent acts. "Our collective unconscious is being flooded with images of violence and this is influencing us to become a more violent society," Lieberman said.

Just as with Facebook's censorship guidelines, there's a fine line between what is in the public's interest and what is gratuitous violence—a distinction that the media has grappled with in deciding how best to cover these kinds of videos.

While some videos, like those depicting police violence, are shared to bring justice to the victims, others, like footage of terrorist attacks, can simply create a climate of fear. Either way, the psychological fallout is very real. So if you must share videos of murder online, do so with caution.

Follow Alexis Linkletter on Twitter.

Photo via Facebook

As Canadian parliament resumes Monday, Justin Trudeau's Liberals are facing criticism over the ambiguity of their environmental platform—an issue that experts say will make environment and climate the front-and-centre issues of this season's parliamentary debates.

The latest news to rattle critics came during an interview with CTV this weekend, in which environment minister Catherine McKenna confirmed rumours that the Trudeau government was going to stick to the previous government's carbon targets as their own.

"What I said is that we will at least meet the target, and that is what I am committed to," she told Evan Solomon in reference to the Harper government's plan of reducing carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

"The Harper target was a fake target because they did nothing. It's not a real target," she said.

In response to VICE's request to interview McKenna on Monday morning, press secretary Caitlin Workman declined, citing a tight schedule on the minister's end, but provided a written statement from McKenna addressing the concern that the Liberals had fallen back on their promise to do better than the Harper government.

"Our government has been clear from the outset that we are taking a different path from that of the Harper government, who set targets with no plan in place to meet them, and no action on climate change," the statement reads.

"A decade of inaction on climate change has meant that Canada's emissions are actually increasing. This reality is making it all the more challenging for us to meet Canada's target, but we are firmly committed to doing so."

The Trudeau government's policy of being vague on climate change isn't new. Video via YouTube

The government's plan on how to meet those targets is heavily reliant on the province's doing the heavy lifting, but also involves the much-anticipated discussion of nationwide carbon pricing—a point which both McKenna and Trudeau have championed as one of the pillars of their climate approach.

It is also one that has fallen short when it comes to concrete strategy. The initial report, which was being worked on by four separate policy think tanks, missed its submission date of September 2. It is expected to arrive shortly.

The interview capped off a rough week for the Canadian government's happy-go-lucky image on environmental policy, one that saw an anti-pipeline protest shut down a portion of Toronto's downtown transit system, followed by reports that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was planning to approve at least one major pipeline project.

At the Paris Climate Conference in April, the prime minister had told attendees and reporters that the goals previously set out by the Harper government were more of a "floor" than a "ceiling" for what could be accomplished. Alongside McKenna's comments, senior government officials also confirmed that the current government plans on ratifying the Paris climate accord without consulting individual provinces (as was originally planned)—which could potentially spell trouble for getting Canada's premiers to back a nationwide effort. (Looking at you, Brad Wall.)

According to Warren Mabee, professor at Queen's University and director of the school's Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy, these events are not anomalies. Rather, they're indicative of a shift in the Trudeau government's approach to "realistically" devising a plan that can both address a floundering, resource-based economy and a dismal environmental track record.

"On one side, we can look at it like they're being less ambitious," he said. "On the other hand, the Liberals have been toying with targets. They might have realized making be a Herculean task."

Mabee said previous failures by the Chrétien and the Harper government with the Kyoto Protocol (Chrétien missed the targets by a longshot, and Harper eventually abandoned the protocol altogether) is something the Liberals are likely trying to avoid by managing people's expectations.

Instead of adhering to the vision of a more ambitious policy, Mabee says that Trudeau needs to find a solution that will help shift the oil-based economies of prairie provinces like Alberta into non-carbon dependent marketplaces—especially now, at a time when oil production has taken a massive hit due to the wildfires that ravaged Fort McMurray and gridlock on pipeline construction has tied up fossil fuel manufacturers.

"The discussion around pipelines is related to a much deeper issue than simply the environment," Mabee said, noting the tense relations between many First Nations and the oil sector. "We, as Canadians, need to keep the pressure on the government so that they make the best decision going forward, without skimping on the optimism they've promoted so much."

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Illustration by Stephanie Santillan

On September 11, at the most recent Creative Arts Emmys, RuPaul received his first Emmy, for Best Reality Show Host for RuPaul's Drag Race. It was a moment of triumph for the world's most successful and famous drag queen, endowing one of his catchphrases—"you better work"—with a double meaning: You better serve it on the runway, but to get paid the way Ru does, you better work really, really hard, too.

On the second season of Drag Race All-Stars, which is currently airing, queens like Alaska Thunderfuck 5000 and Alyssa Edwards compete for a prize of $100,000, an outrageous sum in an industry where most queens perform in bars for dollar bills. We asked four of them—an energetic young queen in Brooklyn, an American making a name for herself in Berlin, a San Francisco legend, and one of Mama Ru's all-stars herself—how they graduated (or are trying to graduate) from amateur tips to professional wages. They spoke to the ways in which drag necessitates hustling to survive and establish one's name—but even with financial success, at the end of the day, the will to perform comes from nowhere but the heart.

THEE SUBURBIA, Brooklyn, NY. Years doing drag: 1–2

I've been doing drag for two years, but in my first Drag Race audition tape, I said since birth. In reality, I've been performing professionally for about a year. The biggest challenge in terms of making money at first is getting people to know who you are. People need to respect you, so you have to show them a strong concept every single time—for me, it's gotta be something high energy and controversial.

When I perform, people give me tips, and I get a booking fee. I work three parties a week, plus my own party called Bananas. A lot of the work I do is just getting my name out there. I also make money selling real estate and writing for a website called Melo. Everybody should have an alternative besides drag.

I recently went to Milwaukee, and that was good coin. The place was packed with people, they had a good budget for the show, and the tips, plus the base pay, were amazing. When you're from New York and you're traveling, just saying you're from here—and actually giving people what they expect from someone saying that—instantly makes the coin rise up. On Twitter, they were like, "Someone's coming from NYC..." and a lot of people came just to see who it was, even though I haven't been on Drag Race.

PANSY, 30, Berlin, Germany. Years doing drag: 10

I started doing drag in San Francisco ten years ago for fun. Then I moved to Berlin to be an artist after graduating from art school, but I found art to be really unfulfilling. One night, years ago, I really wanted to see a drag show, and there just wasn't anywhere to go—there are shows here in Berlin, but the type of performance, the style and level of humor that I was used to, just wasn't there. So I started doing shows in this tiny bar in , and it grew from there. Within a few months, I was doing a dance party, then I started producing larger drag shows with 300 to 700 attendees, and in the span of three years, it's grown from myself and two other performers to 15, sometimes 20. And now I've branched out into a queer music festival called Yo Sissy! and other projects.

I wouldn't say I've achieved monetary success, but I definitely consider myself very successful. Berlin has a huge socialist history, and people have strong opinions about money here. So when I do something that on the surface looks very successful, people assume that I'm making a lot of money. Of course, I have to charge entrance fees, pay performers, rent venues, buy insurance. So there's some friction there—and if I have a bad show, I'm fucked. But personally, I don't do drag for money. I use drag to make money, but I do drag because I love it and believe that it brings people pleasure.

PEACHES CHRIST, San Francisco, California. Years Doing Drag: 20

The first time I was paid to do drag was at Trannyshack in 1996, and I performed there for a couple years, but I spent more money renting chainsaws and props for my numbers than I was taking in. Then I realized I could have this Midnight Mass movie show, because I was running theaters, and so I started doing that in 1998. They're cult-movie screenings where we invite guest actors from the films, and we perform spoof tribute sketches, usually a parody of the movie. After a period of many successful years doing that, some friends said to me, "You're making this theater a lot of money. How much do you make?" But my brain wasn't wired that way. In San Francisco, people didn't expect to get paid. We were all doing it with this art for art's sake attitude.

Today, I make almost all of my money via ticket sales for live events that I produce, write and direct, several of which—including Return to Grey Gardens with Jinkx Monsoon, a part-spoof, part-tribute stage show to the movie—we take on tour. I control the box office, and I'm able to pay myself. The biggest thing for me is that I'm entrenched in the cult-movie universe, and I'm also a filmmaker, so my career stretches far beyond drag. I have one foot in the drag world, but I also get booked frequently to do horror conventions. I think if you're a young queen and you're passionate about something like rock 'n roll, it'd be smart to pursue both and try to integrate the two.

COCO MONTRESE, Las Vegas, Nevada. Years Doing Drag: 24

Until 2012, I was making an amazing salary working on the Vegas Strip. I loved entertaining and thought that being on billboards and cabs all over the city was going to be enough for me. I was at the top of my career. I had money put away. I could have retired.

But then I was in season five of RuPaul's Drag Race, which took it to a different place. It's been amazing. I make more doing this than I would have with my college degree. It doesn't always work out like that for everyone, but if you're ambitious enough and you work hard to perfect the craft, you can make a very lucrative living doing drag. My booking fee is high, and it has to do with my résumé. Not just Drag Race, but I also do a lot of corporate events, weddings, and parties. If you limit yourself, then you limit your pay. If you're not able to adjust—if your potential clients are looking for a certain thing, hiring for a certain kind of event, and you can't deliver—you're probably not going to get the job. That's pretty much how that works. They just want to see a great entertainer, and if you're a great entertainer, you'll make great money.

Follow Adam Baran on Twitter.

What does Instagram have against medicine? Photo via Lift Cannabis

Just days before Lift Cannabis Expo took place this past weekend in Vancouver, the event's primary sponsor lost its Instagram account and 11,000 followers along with it.

Lift Cannabis is a news and review site for medical cannabis that only does strain reviews for legal weed available through licensed producers. According to Lift, none of the photos posted to its Instagram feed depict recreational or black market weed.

Still, near the beginning of September, Lift communications director David Brown said he attempted to log into the company's Instagram account and found that the page had been deleted.

"When I logged in in the morning and opened up my Instagram account it just said 'this page is no longer available.'"

Immediately Brown told VICE he filed a report with Instagram that said the account had been deleted unfairly. He'd already been through the process once before in 2015. Back then, Instagram responded to Brown's complaint by reactivating the account and apologizing for the inconvenience. But this time around, Brown said it's been the opposite. For nearly two weeks he heard nothing at all from the company. Then, when he tried setting up a new account for Lift, one that didn't feature any images of cannabis, that too got deleted.

Instagram did not respond to VICE's request for comment. According to the company's Community Guidelines, "Offering sexual services, buying or selling firearms and illegal or prescription drugs (even if it's legal in your region) is also not allowed. Remember to always follow the law when offering to sell or buy other regulated goods."

Brown said the issue highlights confusion around medical cannabis.

"Nothing we're sharing is against the law," he said. "Instagram is a US-based company. I suspect they don't really understand the rules involving Canada."

Lift isn't the only company to be targeted by Instagram. Tweed, Canada's largest licensed producer, had its account shut down twice.

Tweed spokesman Jordan Sinclair told VICE he asked Instagram if there was any way to retrieve older photos that were deleted with the first account.

"That's actually the part that stung the most," he said. "We had some cool stuff that we snapped when we were converting the chocolate factory to the grow op and now those little pieces of Tweed's history are just gone."

Sinclair said Tweed decided not to open up yet another Instagram account because the Community Guidelines are too vague. "The work it takes to build an online community isn't worth it if there's the constant risk of it disappearing," he said, noting Tweed is focusing on Snapchat and Massroots as alternatives.

Brown said with rules around advertising cannabis being so strict, Instagram can be a vital marketing tool.

He pointed out that many dispensaries—which promote weed that's technically still illegal—still have accounts that are intact. Cannabis Culture, which sells recreational weed in Vancouver and Toronto, has had its account deleted in the past, but is currently operational. Same with Leafly and Weedmaps, which both review dispensary weed. High Times, a cannabis magazine that depicts recreational weed trends in America and has 1.3 million followers, also hasn't been touched.

"So a company that operates with the entirely legal medical cannabis space in Canada gets deleted, twice, but a company that cover the federally illegal recreational culture in the US and around the world gets a pass," Brown said. "No rhyme or reason."

Brown said Instagram is either applying its rules arbitrarily, or is basing its decisions on user reports, which means anyone could report their competitor's account to have it shut down.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Sorry kids, this tiny bed-cage is now taken. Image via Craigslist

What is it: A crib. A literal crib, to sleep in.
Where is it: Metrotown, home of mall people.
How much are they asking? $550.

Sometimes when you're cruising the information superhighway you find yourself on craigslist dot org looking for a new home to live in.

I was in this very situation yesterday when I came across this Vancouver crib. Like, actual crib. As in, a baby would maybe look at this ad and say: "It's perfect. The protective bars seem to missing on one side, but my mom can just flip it around to face the wall so I don't fall out of bed at night. Looks like a changing table there on the left, too ."

Coincidentally, I think I read somewhere else on the internet that there's a generation of adult babies out there, many of them still living at home and making their moms do their laundry. Have you heard of this generation? I think there is a cute name for it. Anyway, some of these people seem to be nearing the end of their 20s, and might have the desire to take on a private residence of their own. Like their parents did when banks gave away money for this sort of thing.

In Vancouver, these baby men and women don't make enough allowance to buy homes (except for the nine of them who collectively own $57 million in property). In that sense there are at least two kinds of baby-people: the ones that never had to grow up, and the ones that could never afford to.

This particular (shared) apartment seems suited for that second kind, but one who doesn't want to quit being infantilized cold turkey. Thankfully the baby-appeal extends beyond the under-the-sea mattress print and smaller-than-human room size. There are no overnight guests allowed, you can't smoke, and the ad's nearby "cuisine" options include Subway and Panago.

I can just picture this person waking up in their crib, calling their mom over a Frosted Flakes breakfast, and walking to the mall to work a minimum-wage retail gig. It'll take a few months, but they'll probably learn to wash their own dishes, and live with the weird irony that the generation that has unwittingly kept them trapped in this state also has a name, and it's "baby boomers."

Anyway, it looks like the ad has since been removed, so congrats to the adult baby out there who has finally found a home away from mom!

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Donald Trump at a rally in North Carolina in March. Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images

Less than 36 hours after a bomb ripped through Manhattan on Saturday, Donald Trump called into Fox & Friends to respond to the latest act of terrorism in the US. What the Republican presidential candidate said on the Fox News morning show would have been chilling if it weren't par for the course: Trump called ISIS "very strong" and said they were "winning the war," speculated that the attack had "many foreign connections," denounced Barack Obama for letting in Syrian refugees—a "Trojan horse," he said—and appeared to call for open racial profiling.

"We're allowing these people to come into our country and destroy our country," Trump told the hosts.

Importantly, at the time of Trump's comments, not much was known about the attack. The name of suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami (who is now in custody) had not been released publicly, and we still don't know the extent of Rahami's links to overseas terrorists. Though it's possible Trump had some information that the rest of us didn't, his comments about Syrian refugees (Rahami was born in Afghanistan) suggest otherwise.

In other words, a man who could very well be in the White House next year was talking out of his ass about terrorism on live TV. This is a habit for Trump—after nearly every major terrorist attack, he has no qualms about spreading fear and anger, often trafficking in misinformation, dangerous habits for a man so close to the presidency.

The immediate aftermath of terrorism incidents are often a breeding ground for rumors of all kinds, and public officials are generally pretty cautious in what they say at those times. Barack Obama, in his remarks about the bombing, emphasized the "strength" of New Yorkers and their refusal to let fear rule their lives. Though New York governor Andrew Cuomo said that "a bomb exploding in New York is obviously an act of terrorism," he hardly went out on a limb like Trump, who in less than a half hour implied that the attack was linked to Syria and ISIS, and could have possibly been stopped by more aggressive policing and stricter immigration policies.

Trump's Fox & Friends comments were not a one-off, but the continuation of a long habit of loose talk after an attack. Though there are exceptions to the rule—his response to the Dallas attack on police was relatively measured—generally Trump responds to tragic attacks with a mixture of bluster, innuendo, and sometimes outright falsehoods.

In the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting, for instance, Trump said that the killer had been born in Afghanistan, which was either a lie or a clumsy mistake, and darkly insinuated that "there's something going on" with Obama's refusal to say the words "radical Islamic terrorism." He followed those statements up with some more untruths about whether shooter Omar Mateen had been investigated, and, as he did on Monday, talked about Syrian refugees even though Mateen wasn't of Syrian ancestry.

Trump congratulated himself about "being right" after Orlando, and he echoed that sentiment on Fox & Friends Monday, saying "I knew this was going to happen." He doesn't shy away with making stories about terrorism personal to him—after last year's Paris shooting, he childishly fantasized about personally shooting terrorists.

Another of Trump's go-to moves in response to a terrorist attack is to criticize the "toughness" of the current US leadership. On Fox & Friends, he said, when asked how he'd stop attacks like the one in Manhattan, "We're going to have to do something extremely tough over there," without really specifying where "there" is. When host Steve Doocy, to his credit, pressed Trump for details, the details didn't come: "Like, knock the hell out of them," Trump replied. "And we have to get everyone together, and we have to lead for a change because we're not knocking them, we're hitting them every once in a while, we're hitting them in certain places, we're being very gentle about it, we're going to have to be very tough."

After the San Bernardino shooting, Trump was similarly vague, saying that he'd "get myself in so much trouble" if he said what he'd do to terrorists out loud. And this July, he endorsed the use of "vicious" attacks against ISIS, saying "you have to fight fire with fire." In remarks about the March attack in Brussels, Trump was a little more explicit about what being "tough" meant: "Waterboarding would be fine," Trump said at the time. "If they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding. You have to get the information from these people."

Hillary Clinton criticized Trump over that sort of talk. In response to his remarks about the New York bombing, she accused him of "giving aid and comfort to our adversaries" by conflating the war on terror with a war on Islam—and, in fact, at least one al Qaeda affiliate has used Trump's call for a ban on Muslim immigration in a propaganda video.

Trump has also repeatedly advocated for the open profiling of Muslims by police. He used the Orlando shooting as an opportunity to call for the surveillance of mosques, and on Monday, he said that police "are afraid" to go after potential terrorists because of political correctness.

"You know in Israel, they profile," Trump said on Fox & Friends. "They've done an unbelievable job, as good as you can do."

It's true that Israel routinely profiles—a practice that has been harshly criticized for humiliating its Arab citizens and contributes to their resentment of the government. But Trump has been pretty explicit about his lack of concern for the feelings of Muslims. In March, he accused American Muslims of "protecting each other" rather than reporting suspicious activity—again, he brought out the phrase, "there's something going on," that Trumpian catch-all for whatever conspiracies are conjured up in the minds of his listeners.

Trump is, for now, just a guy with his name on the November ballot. But if he becomes president his habit of jumping to conclusions and making broad insinuations could have more serious consequences. Today, all Trump can do with his anger is call Fox News and hit "tweet." In the White House, he'd have an awful lot of guns and missiles at the mercy of his impulses.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

(Photo: Flickr user Martin Alonso)

Medical cannabis is slowly becoming part of the mainstream discussion in the UK. The NHS is trialling a cannabis vape pen, you can now buy medical oils with a high CBD content (the chemical in weed that helps mitigate the symptoms of lots of nasty ailments) and just last week a parliamentary report recommended that doctors should be able to prescribe medical cannabis to treat around 60 specific conditions.

The US and much of Europe led the way in legalising medical cannabis, and it's looking more and more like the UK is going to finally catch up at some point in the not too distance future. Of course, the fact that weed is currently illegal hasn't stopped many people from using it – it just makes it harder for them to access.

Ahead of a UK-focused episode of our cannabis TV show Weediquette appearing on VICELAND UK, we spoke to six self-medicating patients from around the UK to find out how cannabis has dramatically changed their lives.

FAYE JONES

About five years ago I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. Literally overnight I went from being completely normal, to every joint in my body – from my neck to my toes – being completely stiff and swollen.

The first drug I was given was called Methotrexate; this was combined with painkillers and anti-inflammatory medication. The combined side-effects of these drugs were drowsiness, nausea, brain-fog, fatigue and constipation, among others.

I had to leave work, and after six months of living like that I went back. But things were falling through the cracks, and my boss started to suggest things like cutting down my hours. At that point, I knew I needed something different, because my career was everything to me; I couldn't lose my job. I had just moved into a new home – how was I going to pay this massive mortgage I'd just committed to?

At that point, I turned to cannabis. It's brought me back from the brink of someone unable to work in their twenties, to living a relatively normal life – even going to the gym most mornings. I can now work my 9 to 5, and more importantly I've replaced all the really damaging drugs which I was being asked to take for the rest of my life.

HENRY

I have OCD, and when it gets at its worst I literally end up with nowhere to sleep. I end up hoarding so much that I don't actually have somewhere to lie down. I initially took cannabis because I wanted to drink less, and wanted another recreational option. But I found that when I consumed cannabis I could actually focus on my work – instead of sitting in the corner and doing repetitive behaviours.

At that point, I bought myself a vaporiser and began to consume it regularly – however, when I started looking for work, I came off cannabis as I was worried I'd be drug tested at some point. I took my prescribed Sertraline – a drug with horrible side-effects.

So what I do is I usually medicate before going to sleep. That way I sleep through what would be considered the "high" phase, and that way I'll wake up in the morning feeling calmed but not high. Then I can get on with my day, my job and my life.

JONATHAN LIEBLING

I had a traumatic childhood; I had a mother who had attempted suicide more than once, and an absent father. Growing up, I had severe anxiety and depression, and because of my age I would have probably been diagnosed with something like ADHD.

I came across cannabis at university. After taking it for the first time I realised not only did I feel better in the moment, but the next day I could actually concentrate on my work. So from then on, I made the personal decision to use it. And it helped me a lot, right up to the point where I was arrested for it, and kicked out of university.

Things spiralled out of control and I needed help from a doctor, who agreed to help if I stopped my cannabis use. I did, and he prescribed me Prozac and Diazepam. After two weeks I attempted suicide, on more than one occasion.

The next doctor I saw told me to get off those drugs immediately and carry on what I was doing before. I haven't looked back since.

CLARK FRENCH

Cannabis has changed my life dramatically. It's the difference between having a life and not having a life. I have Multiple Sclerosis, and what this has done to me is taken away everything it is to be Clark.

Cannabis gives me back so much of what it is to be me; without it, I don't know what I'd do. It reduces my pain, my spasms, insomnia – it means that I don't shit myself. The pain that I'm in affects every single moment of every single day.

Cannabis doesn't take all that away entirely, but if my pain was on an 8/10 in a given moment, it can reduce it to 4/10. If it was the exact type and dose that I needed, it could even go to a 2/10. It means I suffer less. Without it, I would be housebound, I wouldn't be able to get out, meet people and contribute to society. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have it; I don't know if life would be worth living.

MATT

I use cannabis as a mood-stabiliser for bi-polar disorder. If I have zero energy during the day, and I'm not getting anything done, I can smoke a joint and it allows me to focus on important things.

With bi-polar, my fluctuations in energy and motivation are quiet extreme – some days I feel like I can't move, whereas other days I have too much energy. Using specific cannabis strains allows me to manage that properly. CBD is an anti-psychotic, which calms me throughout – whereas THC gives me a therapeutic effect.

When it comes to treating bi-polar disorder, it is a complex topic. What works for me does not necessarily work for someone else with the same condition. My own intuition led me to cannabis; I find that it allows me to be myself. Without it, my depression would strike much more regularly and I wouldn't be able to achieve half the amount that I do. It's a part of my life.

ALEX FRASER

At the end of my first year at university I became really ill with Crohn's disease. I was always nauseous, going to the toilet a lot – but I noticed a change one night when using cannabis socially. It was only a small amount, but I immediately noticed my symptoms go.

As time went on, I realised that consuming it in larger amounts through oils and edibles lessened my symptoms significantly. I eventually came off the prescribed Azathioprine, an immunosuppressant which gave me constant flu symptoms. At the time, I was doing a door-to-door sales job... it was pretty much impossible when I was sneezing every five seconds.

Now, I barely throw up, which is miraculous for a Crohn's patient. I go to the toilet about ten times less than I did before; I live my life with a lot less pain. I'd be bed-ridden without it. I wouldn't be able to get to work a lot of the time, and also I wouldn't have half the friends I have met through the medical cannabis community.

Crohn's is an illness that can run your life; it can dictate what you do. With cannabis I get control back, and I get to run my own life.

Watch Weediquette on VICELAND , Sky channel 153, every Monday at 9PM.

More on VICE:

An Edibles Entrepreneur Shares His Weed Industry Secrets

How People Smuggled Drugs Into This Summer's Music Festivals

What Your Choice of Drug Slang Says About You

All photos by Jean-Luc Bouchard

Get the VICE App on iOS and Android.

I love Buffalo sauce. And that's good news for me, because you can find it pretty much anywhere in modern America. Which makes sense, because not only is it objectively yummy, it's also super easy to make. Buffalo sauce, at its most basic level, is nothing more than a vinegar-based hot sauce mixed with melted butter. And in a jam, this quick and easy duo produces a delicious topping for fried chicken and basically any other food worth eating.

You'd therefore imagine, with the widespread popularity of this magical butter-and-pepper sauce, that there might be some consistency in its quality or taste. But instead, prepackaged fast-food buffalo sauces are so varying in flavor, spiciness, and texture that asking for buffalo sauce on the side of your chicken tenders can be a tastebud crapshoot. And so, because I'm a hero, I gathered buffalo sauces from all the major fast-food chains and did an exhaustive and thorough comparison.

I tasted buffalo sauces from McDonald's, KFC, Burger King, Chick-fil-A, Popeyes, and Wendy's. I ranked each sauce from one to ten on overall flavor, spiciness, and texture. I tasted each sauce by itself first and then tested them on a grocery-store chicken nugget. I also developed what I would call a "salt headache" from doing this all in one sitting. I am here to serve.

Here are my results, from worst to best:

Burger King Buffalo Sauce

Nothing in the world is the same color as the Burger King Buffalo sauce. It's difficult to capture on camera, but it's sort of a bright, speckled clay coral. And it has a flavor to match its appearance—for example, bad. Burger King Buffalo sauce is neither spicy enough nor buttery enough, and the flavor profile is instead dominated by a cloying mayo-like taste and consistency. It's on the thick side of the texture spectrum, and combined with its unpleasant aftertaste and general one-note chemical saltiness, it can make the whole eating experience seem like a chore.

Overall Flavor: 3.5; Spiciness: 3; Texture: 4

Popeyes Bayou Buffalo Sauce

This is hard for me. I have a religious devotion to Popeyes spicy fried chicken thighs. But its Bayou Buffalo sauce... sort of isn't a buffalo sauce? It's definitely a vinegar-based hot sauce, but that's basically where the flavor ends. The whole buttery, rich half of the buffalo sauce formula is missing, and what you have instead is a bright red (impossibly red?) hot sauce with tasteless oil globules in it. This is the second-thinnest sauce I tested, which I usually don't mind, but in conjunction with the lack of butter taste, it really compounds the feeling that this is just hot sauce. Please keep eating Popeyes, and keep it in business for me. But make your own buffalo sauce if you bring that sweet, sweet chicken home.

Overall Flavor: 3; Spiciness: 6.5; Texture: 5

KFC Creamy Buffalo Sauce

Right off the bat, I was pleasantly surprised by the spiciness of KFC's Creamy Buffalo. It had the kind of kick you look for in a buffalo sauce. In terms of seasoning, there was a definite hot sauce note throughout with some dairy behind it, but not as much rich butter flavor as I wanted. The sauce was pretty thick, and after a few tastes, it left a heavy feeling in my mouth that coated my throat. There were no unpleasant chemical or sour tastes, but nothing exceptional, either.

Overall Flavor: 5; Spiciness: 7; Texture: 4.5

McDonald's Spicy Buffalo Sauce

This ranking surprised me, because I'm generally not a fan of McDonald's or its food or its frightening spokesman. But its buffalo sauce, if not fantastic, is tasty and distinctly recognizable as buffalo sauce. There isn't as much spice as I like, but of all the sauces tested, this one had the most distinct garlic-powder kick, a secret to good buff sauce. It was also a little less thick than the KFC sauce, which helped. However, it was also the most notably salty of the sauces I tried. I looked up the nutritional facts for each sauce, and lo and behold, McDonald's buffalo sauce contained the most sodium by a high margin—540 mg per 22.5 grams compared Burger King's 360 mg per 28.3 grams (you do the math, nerds!). So while it was definitely one of the tastier sauces I tried, it also left me feeling the least healthy. No easy feat considering my usual diet.

Overall Flavor: 6.5; Spiciness: 5.5; Texture: 5.5

Chick-fil-A Zesty Buffalo Sauce

First place: Chick-fil-A's Zesty Buffalo sauce. Despite its spiciness being average, the flavor of this sauce was distinctly better than all the other buffalo sauces tested. There were clear notes of vinegary hot sauce and butter, with low-lying garlic accents. All in all, a very well rounded sauce experience. It was as thin as buffalo sauce from Popeyes (perhaps a hair thinner), but it clung more easily to the chicken and didn't leave an unpleasant aftertaste. Perhaps most important, it was the only sauce that looked and tasted like a real buffalo sauce an actual person, not a terrifying factory robot, might make in a kitchen. It didn't leave me feeling weird and chemically, and indeed Chick-fil-A's buffalo sauce was the only one tested that I actually wanted to keep eating straight-up like a gross monster.

Overall Flavor: 8; Spiciness: 5; Texture: 7.5

BONUS SAUCES

Wendy's Creamy Sriracha

Wendy's Creamy Sriracha isn't really a buffalo sauce, so I left it out of the official ranking, but it is a creamy hot sauce dip from a major fast-food chain and a tasty one at that. As far as overall taste and spiciness goes, this one kicked the butt of all the buffalo sauces I tried. It had the most spice by a healthy margin, and the taste was considerably more complicated than several of the one-note sauces above. It's spicy and creamy, of course, but there's also a very present mustard and horseradish taste that makes it a lot more interesting. For those of you familiar with Burger King Zesty sauce, it sort of tastes like that mixed with KFC's buffalo sauce. On the downside, it's also incredibly thick. Like, scary thick. Like, it wouldn't slide out of the container, so I had to spoon it out, and when I put it on the plate, it kept its form like some kind of tangy slug.

Overall Flavor: 8; Spiciness: 8.5; Texture: 2

All the Sauces Mixed Together

I had a lot of sauce leftover, and since I'm never one to waste anything, I mixed them all together into a slurry and tasted it. By this point in the testing process, my body had begun to shutdown from too much salt and xanthan gum, but I managed a couple of tastes. Honestly? Not bad. The Wendy's Creamy Sriracha helped raise the overall spiciness level, and the thin and thick sauces combined into a not-terrible viscosity.

Overall Flavor: 5; Spiciness: 6; Texture: 6

In conclusion: If you're looking for a good fast-food buffalo sauce, go to Chick-fil-A. Or make your own sauce (it's hella easy). If you want a good fast-food sauce in general, go to Wendy's. And if you're looking to really hit your quota on daily sodium intake, be like me and simply hoard all the sauces you can find and then stir them up into a bowl of sin.

Follow Jean-Luc Bouchard on Twitter.

Christen and her father after her suicide attempt. Photo courtesy Christen McGinnes

This post originally appeared on the Trace.

About 85 percent of people who attempt suicide with a gun will die. Christen McGinnes, 47, is a statistical exception: On October 22, 2010, she pointed a .357 revolver at her head, and pulled the trigger. Today, 46 surgeries later, she is a volunteer with the Trauma Survivors Network at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia. Here is her story, in her own words, as told to Kerry Shaw of The Trace.

I think of 2009 as the year everything fell apart. I got fired from a job I'd had for 18 years. I lost my dog, I lost my best friend to lung cancer, I lost my grandma. My romantic relationship ended. Everything that I cared about and believed in disappeared.

That's around when I started drinking. My savings ran out. I lost my insurance, which had paid for my depression and anxiety medication. I got evicted. My car was almost repossessed, twice. I tried to soldier on, to act as if I was going to be OK. But I wasn't.

One morning, I got up after a sleepless night and thought about killing myself. I just didn't see a way out. It took me about an hour to decide to do it, and once I did, I felt at peace.

I cleaned my apartment. And then I loaded the gun I had for protection, a .357 revolver, with hollow point bullets, because I knew that would kill me. I didn't want the bullet to go through me and through the ceiling because the guy living above me had a dog I adored. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt either of them. So I decided to shoot myself on the balcony, which was made of thicker wood.

It was 7 AM and I sat there for a moment and prayed. I prayed that God would forgive me for what I was about to do. I prayed that my family and friends would be OK. Then I pulled the trigger, and it clicked. I'd only loaded four bullets into a five-bullet revolver. And I thought, Oh my god. Maybe this isn't meant to be?

I looked down at my phone and went through my contact list, looking at my friends' names. I felt like I had worn out my welcome with everyone. I thought about how I'd ruin their day by telling them that I had just tried to kill myself. Now I know that was the depression talking, but back then, I just didn't want to be a burden anymore.

So I decided that I really did want to die, and I put the gun underneath my chin and pulled the trigger again. This time there was a huge explosion.

I heard my roommate scream, "What the hell was that?!" I didn't know he was home. That's what saved my life—he called 911.

I can only imagine what he saw, because I blew my face off. I lost two thirds of my teeth, all of the right side of my face, a third of my tongue, and my right eye. I wasn't in pain. I was just surprised. I had been waiting to see my life flash before my eyes, to see the white light, and none of it happened.

I heard sirens. I remember a man putting his hands on my shoulders and saying, "You're going to be OK. I've got you." And then I blacked out.

I was taken to Fairfax Inova Hospital and was in a semi-coma for three weeks. I was vaguely aware of my visitors. So many friends came by that I was told later they lifted the restriction of only two visitors at a time. My mother, brother, father, and stepmother were there. I remember being annoyed with my mom because she kept making me wiggle my fingers and toes to prove I could hear, and I just wanted to sleep.

When I woke up from my coma, my dad was holding my hand. He told me all that I had to do was heal. He said I'd been saved for a reason and we were going to find out what that reason was.

My face was gone, so I couldn't talk or eat or drink. I had a tracheotomy and a feeding tube in my stomach. And I had to chop off all my hair because it was full of blood and bone. But I was so happy to be alive.

It wasn't easy to find a place where I could recover. I ended up moving into an extended stay hotel, where I took care of myself for two years. I got on disability and Medicaid and my family pitched in. I also started to see a psychiatrist and a therapist. Because I couldn't talk, I'd type on the computer in a large font, and they'd sit behind me and read what I wrote.

It wasn't until the trache came out in November 2012 and the hole in my throat closed that I could begin to talk again. The wonderful man that I was dating at the time is partially deaf so I had to speak with emphasis and clarity in order for him to understand me. I'd have to repeat things five, six, seven times and then write them down. It was a form of speech therapy. I was eligible for formal speech therapy, but I felt I was doing pretty well on my own, and because rest was such a vital part of my recovery, I tried to limit my activities. It was about a year before I could speak clearly enough for most people to understand me.

In November 2013, three years after I tried to commit suicide, I could finally talk again, and I started volunteering at the hospital that saved my life. One day, I walked into the room of a young kid who had a sitter—someone who had to stay with him 24/7 because he'd attempted suicide. I told him that I'd once tried to kill myself. He opened up and told me things that he hadn't told anyone else. I held his hand and listened, and that's when I knew: This is why I've been saved.

I am still missing a third of my tongue, and I have 11 teeth. You can tell that something happened to me, but I look mostly like I did before. And that is due to the skill and perseverance of my amazing plastic surgeon, Dr. Reza Mirali. Because I knew how much he believed in me, I never got to that point where I wanted to give up.

I've had 46 surgeries, and I've learned that the more sleep I get, the faster I heal. So I sleep 16 hours a day. And yes, this whole process has been very painful. I'm glad to say that I'm not on any prescription painkillers—I don't want to be an addict. I take one Aleve every day and that's enough to keep the tears out of my eyes.

I take my housemate's black Labrador for walks. I spend a lot of time on Facebook, and I'm writing a book about my experience. I don't drink anymore. I know that in order to keep myself sane and happy, I can't. I've been dating someone for three years who is very, very supportive of my surgeries and my scars. He's so unconditionally loving. It's been wonderful.

For about a year, any time I saw a gun in front of me, I felt compelled to pick it up and shoot myself. I am around guns because I have several friends who are ex-military and they own guns, and I also have a lot of friends who are pro-gun, so when I visit their houses, I know there are guns in the house. But that's OK, I'm fine with that now. It's not a risk factor for me anymore.

My dad asked the detective who worked on my case to have my gun destroyed so it would never hurt another person. I will never own another gun again.

For the most part, people have been very supportive, but I've lost friends because they don't want to be there if I try it again, or they don't want me around their children. There's a stigma with suicide, and some people think I'm crazy or unbalanced.

I worry about re-entering the job market and trying to explain this six-year blank in my resume. I'm going to tell them why because I've been so open about my suicide attempt that anyone who googles me will see it.

At the same time, I think that's the only way to go forward: to be open and honest. Perhaps by acknowledging how severe depression and anxiety can be, we can provide help for other people. If I can cause one person to reach out and ask for help because of my example, then talking about this will all be worth it.

If I could go back to my younger self in October 2010, I'd tell her to call my dad and let him know how bad it is. My dad dropped everything to rush to me and has never left. I didn't realize he was willing to do that.

That's an example of the tunnel vision that you get with anxiety and depression. When you're in the middle of the worst time of your entire life, you can't see anything else. You can't see a way forward; all you can see is down.

If anyone is feeling like they might be thinking of hurting themselves, they should reach out to a suicide hotline or someone who cares. Help will flood in, they will be amazed. I have been. Help is there. And it's worth it. Life is worth it.

The National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. It is available 24 hours a day.

A version of this article was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Trace on Facebook or Twitter.

Get the VICE App on iOS and Android.

Punk's not dead. All photos by Chris Bethell and Harry Johnson

We spoke to over 2,500 18 to 34-year-olds living in the UK to explore and document what life is like for young people in Britain in 2016. From Blackpool to Belfast, from country fairs to council estates, the nation's youth told us exactly how they felt about money, politics, drugs, sex, music, clothes and everything else that matters. This is the VICELAND Census, all this week on VICELAND and VICE.COM.

Over the last ten years, endless trend forecasters and researchers have told us that youth tribes are on the way out. Young people today don't want to look weird and listen to aggressive music; they just buy all their clothes from Asos and Snapchat their breakfasts. Gone are the days of men putting on full make-up before heading to the shops, or legitimately thinking a pork pie hat with Winklepickers is a good look: academic research and think-pieces have decreed that the style tribe is suffering, terminally.

But I'm not so sure. Yes, our amalgamated culture may have made them rarer, but this a country built from the leather of punks, the ruffles of the New Romantics and the mascara gloop of the goths – surely young people haven't just given up on that altogether? In fact, when we questioned actual VICE readers in the recent VICELAND UK Census, the majority said they did still identify with a subculture.

I needed to find the truth. So I headed out into 21st century Britain with two goals: to see if style tribes still exist, and to find the right one for me.

CAMDEN LOCK PUNKS

My first stop was Camden – the spiritual home of dog chains and whoopee cushions – to immerse myself in its infamous Lock punk scene, inhabited by the tattooed, ripped-jean-wearing tough guys who sit around the canal every day. But I wasn't going to fool these angst-riddled day drinkers any old way. I was going to have to walk like them, breathe their air and embody their very essence. I needed to feel the anger, to stick a finger up to my own face, so I underwent a rite of passage.

FUCK! PUNK! YEAH! I felt the angst course through my veins. I grabbed a marker and began scribbling over my arms – what was happening to me? What was happening to me is: I was becoming a punk.

Tattoos, a bleeding ear and bin bags: I was ready.

After purchasing the garb, I spotted the Camden Lock punks straight away, hanging from a bridge. "I come with an offering," I said, and divvied out the bottles of London Pride, Spitfire and Punk IPA I'd just spent 20 minutes fretting over. They seemed to like it. Dave, 18, told me I looked "fucking sick". The group concurred.

"Do you dress like that every day?" he asked. I nodded.

Ellena, 16, tapped me on the shoulder. When I turned around I saw her pointing with a look of dread. "Your ear is bleeding, badly," she said. "Have you just had it pierced?"

I shrugged.

"No, seriously, you need to get that looked at – it could get infected and you could get ill. Put some Savlon on it or something." The word Savlon inspired a group nod.

Will, 22, introduced me to the clan, most of whom are aged between 14 and 16. There was Nat, George, Dale and Ellena, with her sage advice on antiseptics, who was quick to assert that she's "not punk, but Polish goth".

"Me too," I said, before Dave pointed at someone in the street and said, "She'd look better with my cum on her face."

I got involved with the group activities. We stood, drank and, on occasion, yelled things at the denizens of Camden. I called a Yorkshire Terrier a "prick"; Dave laughed.

After a bit of being faintly aggressive on a bridge, I was spent. Punks seem to be angry, and I'm just not sure how much anger there is in me. To be honest, I really like dogs – especially Yorkshire Terriers. So it was time to wave goodbye to Dave and his comrades.

He had a look of disappointment strewn across his face as I made my excuses. "We're all coming down next weekend and there's gonna be tons of us. You should come," he said, hopefully.

Yeah, sure Dave, I'll definitely, definitely be there.

SKATERS

Being a skater isn't like being a punk: it requires commitment, skill and courage. I wanted to be a skater when I was a teenager, but I was too busy pilfering gin from my mate's parents or memorising Kurt Cobain's ThinkQuote page. But now I have much more time on my hands, so I planned on achieving my dream at the Southbank.

I quickly tried to make friends with my best skater chit-chat. I asked what OPM track they were listening to, but they just kind of giggled. Rohan, 18, had never even heard of the "Heaven Is a Halfpipe" one-hit wonders. "Nah, I listen to Japanese techno when I skate, bruv," he said.

It quickly became clear that one must prove their worth to be taken seriously in this world: I needed to skate. So I took a gulp of air, galloped over and asked for a minute with Rohan's board. He scrunched his face and rolled it over toward me. With all eyes on me, I jumped on. I held myself still on the concrete pillar and pushed out across the paving slabs, feeling the breeze against my reddened cheeks. I'd never felt so alive. 'I am a natural a master of the ground.' I thought. And now, to fly...

My ollie didn't quite come off, but I certainly had everybody's attention. Shortly after this, though, I became very tired. Years sat at a computer pitching new ways to embarrass myself for VICE articles have not made me the fittest of fleas. I needed a sit down.

Stretched out on the wall alone and completely zonked got me thinking. 'Do I really want this?' I pondered. A grown man, risking my life like this for the praise of a few teenagers in Billabong shorts? No. I strolled off into the sun and, though Rohan didn't say goodbye, I knew he was crying it out inside.

TOFFS

I was looking for something comfier – something that didn't require kneepads – and the perfect thing was just one train away. The subculture sweeping through the streets of South West London is a simple one: Nu-Toryism.

So I sprayed on some aftershave, headed to Clapham's finest self-service fine wine spot and poured myself a glass of Prosecco.

I don't know anything about wine – never had an interest. But after overhearing one or two Blumenthalian conversations, I reckoned I'd got the gist. "Have you tried the Zinfandel?" I interjected, as this guy and his companion tried to make their choice. "It's hearty, but really sets the tangers off."

"I haven't, but we had a heavy lunch, so we're looking for something a bit more... humble?" this guy replied.

"Well, why don't you just slide into something nice and autumnal?" I said.

"That's a really good point," his friend replied. Her face lit up. "Do you work here?"

"I don't, no. Can see why you'd think that, though!"

We all laughed, and I died a little inside. Punks, skaters and now nu-Tories had all welcomed me with open arms, but the ease of assimilating had cheapened the experience. Not even the prick to the ear felt real. And is that a surprise? Real people don't live in London; real things don't happen in London: it's a false place. To get the authenticity I craved, I needed to get out of the capital.

SKINHEADS AND THAT

From the Beatles to its ingrained citywide distrust of mainstream media, I've always felt an affinity with Liverpool. It's like an inclusive family more so than anywhere else in the country, and it's a family I want to be a part of. Stepping off at Lime Street station, the first thing you see is actual young people hanging out. One group in particular looked like they've strolled out of a doomed-to-be-cancelled-after-a-season Channel 5 drama executive produced by Fearne Cotton. But with the last 30 years of youth culture somewhat surreally represented in one group, they seemed like a good place to start. So I headed over to ask what they identify themselves as.

"Well, he's a mod, these four are punks and we're skinheads," said George, 16, pointing at his friend on the far right. "He was a skinhead, then his dad took his boots off him."

He seemed to know what he was talking about, so I asked for an inside scoop of the city: what are the dominant subcultures? Where do I find them?

"Well, you've got the classic Prinnies drinking their Prin and Tonics and the scallies or whatever. But I suppose what everybody is talking about at the moments are Johnheads."

"Johnheads?" I asked. They all laughed.

"Yeah, Johnheads. Comes from hanging in St John's – that shockin' old shopping centre."

"Where do I find them, these Johnheads?"

"Just follow the ketwigs, mate."

"Okay. Remind me what ketwigs are again, quickly?" They all laughed again.

"Something that the scallies got hold of so they can get into fessies without trouble." I need a fucking Rosetta Stone to keep up. "Mate: just follow the ketwigs, that'll lead you to the Johnheads." Right.

JOHNHEADS

Find the ketwigs and they'll lead you to the Johnheads. Got it. I asked a local Liverpudlian walking through town: "Where can I buy a ketwig?"

He keeled over with laughter, patted my back and said, "Classic, mate!" I didn't understand what was so funny. So I turned to Google and slowly started to understand. From ketwigs through Lids to Johnheads, before my eyes, a rich tapestry of fluid nomenclature and sociological progression rolled out. So how do I become one? Basically, it's black outerwear, coupled with greasy hair stuffed under a cap and, weirdly specifically, a bottle of milkshake. I could handle that.

Walking through town, I felt a sense of ease at my core. And as the prophecy foretold, what looked like a "ketwig" flew past me, doing a wheelie on a bicycle down the middle of the road. I gave chase.

"Alright, lad?" he asked.

"Yeah, what are you up to?"

"Biking."

"Yeah? Where are you going?"

"Just biking, really."

"Cool."

He cycled on. Then a little further up the road – coming from the same direction – he passed me again. And again. This Johnhead was contently circling the block – fascinating.

Strolling through the park, I saw a duo of Johnheads talking while their dogs stood nearby. What were they up to? "Nowt." We talked a bit more. They had never met each other before. That's just the code of the Johnheads: standing about, doing nowt.

I reared off towards Liverpool's stadium and found a Johnhead standing alone, looking out over a balcony and sipping a Galaxy milkshake. It was like looking in the mirror.

"What are you up to?" I asked.

"My mate is at the game, la, so I'm just waiting."

"You're not going?"

"No, I'm an Evertonian."

"But it's only just kicked off: you're just gonna wait here for two hours?"

"Yeah."

"Sound," I replied.

We stood there and waited, each sipping our milkshakes absently; sharing nods and occasional words; listening to the whirls and crashes from inside the stadium and feeling the ground lightly rumble below us. After 20 minutes of waiting, I realised that it's quite zen, being a Johnhead: a Cagian masterclass of tying oneself to the rhythm of the city. Not enjoying the small things, just existing among them. I had found deep satisfaction on a level I'd never experienced before. Johnheadism was an antidote to my intensity and dissatisfaction; I was a better person.

So if you can learn anything from me, let it be that it's never too late for happiness. Dig out those old boots, go buy yourself a snapback, crack out your best hair-clips – whatever it takes – and embrace the feeling of belonging. Me? I would disappear into the Wilderness of St John's Market, would let my hair grow out and let the sweetened milk nourish me from here on in.

I am a Johnhead.

@Oobahs

More on the VICELAND UK Census:

Why Young People Are Wrong To Abandon Patriotism

The VICELAND UK Census: Britain, Politics and Discrimination

Watch VICELAND on your TV right now

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Estero, Florida, on Monday. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

US News

Trump Questions Medical Treatment for Bomb Suspect
Republican nominee Donald Trump said it was a "sad situation" that bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami was getting medical treatment, calling his hospitalization "amazing." Rahami, who was taken into custody and hospitalized after a shootout with police in Linden, New Jersey, has been charged with five counts of attempted murder of a police officer. Trump also expressed regret that Rahami would "be represented by an outstanding lawyer" and called for "harsh punishment to these people." —NPR

Bush Senior Voting for Clinton, Claims Kennedy Family Member
Former president George H. W. Bush plans to vote for the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, according to Kathleen Hartington Kennedy Townsend, former Maryland lieutenant governor and the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy. Townsend posted a picture with Bush on Facebook alongside the caption: "The president told me he's voting for Hillary!!" —USA Today

Video Showing Tulsa Cop Shooting Unarmed Man Released
Tulsa Police Department has released video showing an officer shooting Terence Crutcher, a 40-year-old unarmed African American man. Police chief Chuck Jordan said officer Betty Shelby fired after telling a dispatcher she was "not having cooperation" from Crutcher. The Justice Department will review the case. —NBC News

Only 3 Percent of Americans Own Half of All Guns
A new survey shows that 3 percent of American adults own half of all the guns in the US. The study by Harvard and Northeastern researchers show 133 million guns are concentrated in the hands of this "super-owner" group, who have amassed an average of 17 guns each. —The Guardian

International News

Aid Convoy Attacked in Syria
Either a Syrian or Russian aircraft is believed to have carried out strikes on an aid convoy near Aleppo that left more than a dozen, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The UN has confirmed that 18 trucks in the convoy were hit near the town of Urum al-Kubra; UN aid chief Stephen O'Brien said if the attack was found to be deliberate, it would amount to a war crime. Both Russian and Syrian forces have denied involvement in the attack. —CNN

North Korea Says It's Preparing for Satellite Launch
North Korea has carried out a successful ground test of a new rocket engine to launch satellites into space, according to state media. Leader Kim Jong-un has asked scientists and engineers to make preparations for a satellite launch "as soon as possible" on the basis of the test. —Reuters

Migrants Flee Huge Fire at Greek Camp
Up to 4,000 people were evacuated on the Greek island of Lesbos after a massive fire swept through a migrant camp. No injuries have been reported, but around 30 percent of the camp was destroyed. According to an aid worker, the fire started after an argument over food.—BBC News

At Least 17 Killed in Kinshasa Protests
At least 17 people have been killed in clashes between police and anti-government protesters in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The protesters were part of a movement demanding that President Joseph Kabila step down as the country's constitution mandates—so far, he has shown no sign of doing so. The government has now banned all demonstrations against the president.—Al Jazeera

Everything Else

Skittles Responds to Trump Jr.'s Refugee Analogy
Wrigley, owner of the Skittles brand, has responded to Donald Trump Jr. comparing the Syrian refugees to a bowl of "poisoned" Skittles. The company stated: "Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don't feel it's an appropriate analogy."—The Hollywood Reporter

iPhone 7 Sales Start Strong
Apple's iPhone 7 accounts for 1 percent of the overall iPhone market share, while the iPhone 7 Plus represents 0.2 percent, according to research firm Localytics. It matches sales for last year's iPhone 6s, which captured a 1 percent market share during its first weekend.—Fortune

Kellogg Issues Eggo Waffle Recall
The food giant has announced a recall for 10,000 boxes of Eggo waffles in 25 states due to a potential listeria contamination. Kellogg said it has not received any reports of illness but is recalling the boxes as a precaution.—TIME

Bombing Suspect's Family Restaurant Slammed on Yelp
The family of alleged New York City bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami owns a fried chicken restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Though most people on Yelp are angrily trashing the restaurant, some have offered supportive comments. —VICE News

FBI Agent Busts Alleged Explosive Buyer on Dark Web
The FBI has arrested a Houston man who allegedly tried to buy explosives on the dark web after an undercover agent posed as a seller on AlphaBay. Cary Lee Ogborn is charged with attempting to transport explosives with the intent to use them. —Motherboard

Light Box Therapy Triples Sexual Satisfaction
Scientists at the University of Siena have discovered a possible solution to problem of low male sex drive: light box therapy. Their findings show the men who received full light therapy tripled their sexual satisfaction scores. —Broadly

Get the VICE App on iOS and Android

This story appeared in the September issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

The most dramatic publishing Cinderella story in recent memory belongs to the Irish novelist Eimear McBride. She wrote her first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, in six months when she was 27, but it took her almost half a decade to find a publisher. In 2013, a man her husband met at a bookstore offered to consider the manuscript for a press he was starting. The press, Galley Beggar, based in Norwich, accepted the book. It became a sensation.

The same experimental, "difficult" voice that made mainstream publishers reject it was heralded with praise like "daring" and "remarkable"; it earned McBride comparisons to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who share her penchant for grammatical manipulation and harrowing themes. (In the bleak story, a teenage narrator seems to speak from a preconscious state as she deals with sexual abuse, poverty, puberty, and a brother's brain tumor.) In 2014, McBride won the prestigious Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

"People do live with terrible things. They don't ever escape them, but it's possible to find ways to live with them."

But in the years between writing Girl and the raging success it became, McBride was toiling on a book that she was "in love with." "I think I'm still slightly shocked that I've finished it," she told me of her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, which took nine years to write and comes out this month. "Girl became successful very quickly, and it kind of gave me a fear—I imagined people saying, 'Oh, she'll never write another book as good as this.'" She reads the reviews.

The Lesser Bohemians is a softer, more open work. A love story about an actor with a dark past and an 18-year-old Irish drama student (who also has a dark past), the novel examines a relationship that feels familiar: McBride charts its course from a shy beginning to "cringey stuff" like jealousy and falling in love, to fights, late-night confessions, and (lots of) sex.

It's a more personal read than her first book, which explains McBride's nerves. "The extremity of Girl placed a safe distance between the reader and the characters," she said. "The Lesser Bohemians is more likely to make people feel more vulnerable."

Part of that sensitivity is due to the sex scenes, which she acknowledges can be "dangerous" territory for a writer. But it's also because The Lesser Bohemians leaves you hopeful. "I realized early on that it was a book about survival in a way that Girl is not. People do live with terrible things. They don't ever escape them, but it's possible to find ways to live with them. It seemed truer to make this messier."

This story appeared in the September issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

All of these photos are illustrative, i.e. the people in these photos are real people and are not meant to specifically represent any of the fantastical drunk straw men detailed below. All photos by Bruno Bayley, who made us put this disclaimer in.

The Sun, again, with its news. Here it is yesterday: "EVERYONE holds their booze in different ways, but apparently all of us can be placed into specific drunken personality types," The Sun said. "Researchers from the University of Missouri grilled 187 students about their tipsy and sober states."

Okay, I understand: we are all unique and different people. We consume and process alcohol in different ways. Behaviours change, moods change. I understand this.

Ah, there's a little bit more: "The experts then came up with the four most common drunk personalities—" No. Incorrect. Wrong. The news we are meant to accept without question here is: there are only four types of drunk personality:

- The Hemingway (drinks without really changing personality)

- The Mary Poppins (drinks and becomes sweet and agreeable)

- The Nutty Professor (drinks and "reveals a second personality", presumably a shrinking-then-ballooning Eddie Murphy yelling about how he doesn't owe Mel B nothing)

- The Mr Hyde (drinks and becomes a bad bastard)

We are to forget the trouser-pissers, the kebab goblins. We are to forget the collapsers and the lad who always ends up in a police car.

Now: much respect for science, but no. I mean, I understand that researchers at the University of Missouri grilled 187 students, but no. They have not figured out enough. I ask them: are they, the scientists, a walking content factory, conjuring up an actually accurate list of all the different types of drunk people they will encounter over the course of their lives? They are not. I am. Here is that list.

ONE WHO GOES AWAY AND COMES BACK WITH FOOD

One of the most iconic moments of my drinking career was when I went missing for an hour from a pub we were watching the FA Cup final in and only came back once I'd gone to Tesco pissed and really messily eaten two consecutive Meal Deals while sat on the floor outside it. There is a drunk like me among your group. There is a drunk who, at an undefined point in the evening, exits stage left and doesn't come back until they've got garlic sauce all over their hands and top.

ONE WHO GOES AWAY AND TURNS UP AND WHEN YOU ASK THEM WHERE THEY WENT THEY GO QUIET AND—

—and long story short: they fell asleep on the toilet.

LAD WHO REALLY, REALLY, REALLY HAS TO LISTEN TO THIS ONE SONG, RIGHT, NO, BECAUSE—

This guy's drunkenness only kicks in about 10.30PM, because he's been quiet so far, and then suddenly – with a jerk, his body controlled by forces you can't quite see, the kind of drunk where you rise out of a chair chest-and-ribcage first, dragged by ghosts – and then suddenly he's up at the barmaid, going "Can I plug my iPod in? One song... one song!" Or he's on your bus playing you exactly one Arctic Monkeys lyric video via a staggering 4G stream on his phone, or, worst of all these, he's at a house party and suddenly, chimplike, he has crawled his way to the sound system, and he is pawing at it, and there are great staticky pulses that engulf the room, and everyone looks around at the silence, and then, suddenly, there he is, eyes closed and a single finger gyrating in the air, going, "No, right: you have to listen to every note of this eight-minute guitar intro," and man: this dude gets beaten up like you wouldn't believe.

THE GIRL WHO ALWAYS – EVEN THOUGH THERE WASN'T ONE IN THE HOUSE, OR THE PUB, OR THE PUB GARDEN, OR ANY OF THE NEARBY SHOPS, AND SHE DIDN'T COME WITH A BAG OR A RUCKSACK SHE COULD HAVE BOUGHT IT IN, SO WHAT THE FUCK – THE GIRL WHO ALWAYS, TWO HOURS INTO A SESH, SOMEHOW MAGICS UP AND THEN WEARS A FLOWER CROWN

She is a magician. She is a wizard. She is like Derren Brown, if Derren Brown needed two of his mates to help him get out of a romper to piss.

BLISSFUL PARALYSIS

My favourite types of drunk are those people who at some point in the night turn into what is essentially a very happy corpse – laughing, chatty, eyes rolled back in their skull, body medically dead – the kind who somehow hit their limit at 7.30PM and end up in a cab doing laps of their building because they won't disclose their actual address as part of some sort of marvellous cabby joke. These people are great because, like enchanted pixies, nothing bad ever seems to happen to them. They don't end up mugged, covered in vomit, shuttling around the tube late at night backwards and forwards until they are taken to lost and found: they just end up in bed by about 9PM, absolutely hammered, smiles on their faces.

LAD WHO IS CONVINCED HE CAN WALK – OR, WORSE, CYCLE – HOME WITHOUT ASSISTANCE, ENDS UP EIGHT MILES IN THE WRONG DIRECTION WITH REALLY SORE FEET, ENDS UP HAVING TO CALL HIS MUM FOR HELP

And then does it all again exactly the same way the next week. Elton John was right about that circle of life shit, he just didn't mention how often in that circle you'd have to, in an emergency, sleep on a roundabout.

'ONE MORE ROUND! ONE MORE ROUND! IT'S ON ME. MY ROUND! ONE MORE ROUND!'

There is a magical unspoken moment at the end or near-end of a night out where – silently, without consultation – everyone decides that enough is enough; this is the last one; next goal wins; I'm getting an Uber your way actually if you want to split it.

Apart from one lad, the guy who currently has a single hand clamped around your arm, two fingers in the air to call the barman over, and he's just ordered four shots and two pints, and he's whispering to you – whispering so close that you feel it in your ear when he spits – "One more, lad... we'll stay out for one more," and this is where the night dies. This is where it winds away like soap water down a plughole; you are naked and shivering in the empty bath of this night, and he knows somewhere nearby that'll be open – he's sure of it – and you walk around the streets until you see a strip club. It's cold and you didn't bring a jumper, and it's £10 in and he's covering it – and there you are, sobering up already somehow, watching in reverse every bad decision you have ever made that has bought you up to this point in the reflected Swarovski of a bedazzled G-string.

And then when you finally get home – pissed, not-pissed, both tired and awake, £60 down, work in two hours – you get a hammered, hammered, hammered WhatsApp from him going: "Great night, that! Great!" And then, with a clunk of dread, you see the "... is typing" notification: "Remember how I mentioned Bucharest! I just ordered us two flights!"

You just lost £350 more and a week of your annual leave. You cannot escape this. You are his best friend now. You are his best friend and you are going to die, together, in Romania.

THAT ONE WHO JUST SMILES A LOT

In 2001, So Solid Crew asked us a question: "Ha, ha, ha. What you laughing at?" And, in many ways, they were asking a question to the future. They were asking drunk people: what are you laughing at? They were also setting up a platform that would lead to three of the members going on The Games and one member going to prison for murder, so. The moral of the story is we cannot always trust what So Solid Crew have to say.

GIRL WHO TALKS IN CIRCLES WITH HER EYES HALF CLOSED AND THEN LATER SOMEHOW MANAGES TO DRINK VODKA AND CRY AT THE SAME TIME???

I recently spent two hours at my own house party listening to a friend of mine tell me the exact same anecdote maybe 15, 20 times in a row and I've got to say: that was not a well-formed anecdote even at all and I did not enjoy it the first time.

LAD WHO JUST FLIPS AT A CERTAIN POINT IN THE BANTER DISCOURSE AND GETS REALLY FUCKING MOODY AS A RESULT OF IT

6.30PM: Alright boys! Mine's a Heineken. Hehe. DRINK IT DOWN, YOU ZULU WARRIOR! DRINK IT DOWN, ZULU CHIEF, CHIEF, CHIEF!

6.45PM: Your round!

7.07PM: HE'S GAY! Haha, only joking. HE'S CHEATING ON YOU! OI, ROB, ARE YOU GONNA SHAG THIS BIRD OR AM I GOING TO DO IT FOR YOU! Ha ha ha!

7.59PM: Bollocks! Ha ha ha. The bollocks game. We all did it in uni. No, you can't flick me back!

8.45PM: I know karate

9.03PM: It's just you're always a twat, that's why! No. Fuck off. Fuck off! You're all twats, anyway. Defending him. You're all bastards and twats. Fuck off. Fuck offffffff!!!

LAD WHO REALLY WANTS TO TALK ABOUT SOMETHING HE HEARD YOU SAID ABOUT HIM EIGHT MONTHS AGO, WITH AN OPEN HAND QUIETLY PRESSING – JUST THE FINGERS, JUST THE FINGERTIPS – INTO THE HOLLOW OF YOUR CHEST

"No, because, right, no, because: I was only saying because I heard, like, what you said about me — and no, it's OK, I know you didn't actually say it — but I heard you said it, so I thought you said it, so I'm here like: 'Did he say it?' And you've come over here and you've said you didn't say it, and like— no, mate, no, you're a top chat, mate, to have the balls! To have the balls to come over here and say that to me. No. I appreciate it. That's balls, that is. But you do understand, right: I proper wanted to twat you, to death, somewhere between 30 to 40 seconds ago."

THE THREE INTERCHANGEABLE LADS WHO OPERATE LIKE A SORT OF CERBERUS IN SPORTSWEAR, WHO STAND IN SILENCE IN CLUBS TOGETHER, WHO SILENTLY DO SHOTS TOGETHER, STAND AND MUTELY INHALE HOT WET PORTIONS OF CHEESY CHIPS TOGETHER, QUIETLY BEAT THE EVER-LOVING SHIT OUT OF A KEBAB MAN TOGETHER AND, YOU CAN ONLY SUSPECT, ON THE GRAVE AND RARE OCCASIONS THEY PULL, SILENTLY HAVE SEX TOGETHER, A REALLY INTENSE QUIET FOURSOME OCCASIONALLY PUNCTUATED WITH SOME HALF-BANTER ABOUT HOW BLACKBURN ROVERS ARE DOING THIS YEAR

Sometimes in life you find the yin to your yang. Sometimes in life your yin-yang combination finds a third half, called Kevin. Sometimes the three of you can only truly mind-meld – only truly interconnect soul and mind and body – when you're five pints of Amstel into a session and there's some Serie A on in Walkabout.

THE PERSON WHO GETS SO DRUNK THAT YOU – THEIR GUARDIAN, THEIR ANGEL – HAVE TO TAKE UP A BELOW MINIMUM WAGE JOB IN CARE JUST TO LOOK AFTER THEM

I have a theory that it's possible in some cases for your brain to remain un-drunk (or at least relatively sober), but your body to get extremely drunk: your skeleton gets drunk and your ligaments get drunk, your jaw and tongue get drunk, and essentially you just turn into this quite floppy flank of meat that can only say, "No, I'm alright, honestly!" while your mate hoists you under each armpit and drags you to the toilet for a slap in the face and a piss. These people – floppy drunks – have an extreme tactical advantage compared to many of their fellow drinkers because they never have to pay for their own taxis home, because one of their mates always gives £30 to a cabby and goes, "Get them home, will you?" in a tender way. They have an extreme tactical disadvantage compared to many of their fellow drinkers, though, because the chance of them very publicly and drunkenly shitting themselves is much, much higher, so. Swings, roundabouts.

THE ONE WHO DOESN'T KNOW WHAT A PROBLEM THEIR DRINKING IS BECOMING, NOT JUST TO THEM BUT TO EVERYONE AROUND THEM, EVER-SO-SUBTLY FRACTURING EVERY RELATIONSHIP THEY HAVE, JUST SLIGHTLY, LIKE BREAKING AN AXLE, YOU KNOW IT IS BROKEN BUT YOU CAN STILL RIDE ON IT, THEY ARE THE SPIDER AT THE CENTRE OF THEIR OWN WEB BITING AWAY AT EVERY STRAND OF IT AND HOPING SOMEHOW NOT TO FALL, THE ONE WHO ALWAYS WAKES UP BLEARY-HEADED FOR WORK BUT DOESN'T KNOW WHY, THE ONE WHO IS TIRED, ALWAYS, PUTTING ON THAT LITTLE BIT OF WEIGHT THEY CAN'T SHIFT, THAT TRUNK WEIGHT, THAT MIDDLE WEIGHT, BUT THEY STILL GET A THIRST ON EVERY LUNCHTIME, DON'T THEY, WHEN THEY WALK PAST THE PUB AND SMELL THAT UNMISTAKEABLE SMELL, OF WADDED DOWN CARPETS AND SPILLED LAGER, THEY JUST GET THE URGE FOR A PINT, JUST ONE CAN'T HURT, MAYBE A TOP, A CHEEKY TOP, A TOP IS BASICALLY A SOFT DRINK, AND THEN THEY GET HOME ON A MONDAY AND THINK: 'HEY, IT'S MONDAY – TINS... TINS CAN'T HURT, CAN THEY? TINS – TINS WITH DINS. THE GUY AT THE CORNER SHOP KNOWS ME BY NOW... IF I'M A QUID OR TWO SHORT HE LETS ME ROLL IT OVER TO NEXT TIME, WHAT A FELLA, WHAT A LAD,' AND THEN AFTER TINS YOU WAKE UP AGAIN WITH THAT BLEARY HEAD, AND SO THE CYCLE CONTINUES, UNTIL THEY DON'T REALLY KNOW WHAT WAKING UP UN-GROGGY FEELS LIKE, SUCH A LONG SLOW CHANGE THEY NEVER REALLY SAW IT COMING, AND GOD LOOK IN THE MIRROR: FUCK, GOD, YOU GOT OLD, THERE, DIDN'T YOU? WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN? THE SKIN SALLOW, THE SKIN GREY, BUT IT'S FINE, ISN'T IT? BUT THEN YOU GO TO WORK AND SOMEONE MENTIONS THEIR HANGOVER AND YOU SAY, JUST A LITTLE BIT TOO LOUD, 'I DON'T GET HANGOVERS, ME!' AND EVERYONE GOES QUIET A LITTLE, BECAUSE THEY KNOW YOU DON'T, BECAUSE YOUR LIFE IS A HANGOVER; YOUR LIFE IS ONE ACHING RECOVERY FROM A LOW-LEVEL TRAUMA YOU KEEP INFLICTING UPON YOURSELF, AND EVERYBODY KNOWS IT BUT YOU—

Still, another pint can't hurt, can it!

@joelgolby

More stuff from VICE, more fun lists:

Here's Every Type of Annoying Person You're Friends with On Facebook

What Your Facebook Profile Photo Says About You

Talking Politics with Drunk Toffs at the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race

Virtual reality video gaming has been a dream of the industry for decades. Now, after several false starts, it's finally happening in a big way. According to the makers of the biggest consumer VR devices, these headsets will offer users a new type of escape, be able to connect people in novel ways, and revolutionize the way people play video games.

But now that the dream of consumer-grade VR is a reality, game makers are starting to explore the ethical boundaries and risks associated with this new world of interactive entertainment: Just what is virtual reality going to do to its players? How will our minds and bodies respond to these deeply immersive experiences?

VICE spoke to developers, designers, and researchers about VR's therapeutic potential, as well as the ethical dilemmas and medical risks game designers must take into account when building new virtual worlds.

Get the VICE App on iOS and Android

Radiohead's Thom Yorke on Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Screenshot via YouTube

I'm pitching you a show. It's animated. It's a talk show. Its host is a cartoon superhero from the 1960s that nobody remembers. It features a band leader and "producer" who are, respectively, a psychotic mantis and a man made of molten lava.

They interview trendy celebrities—Thom Yorke, Michael Stipe, Jon Stewart, Penne and Teller, Lassie the dog. The celebrities have almost no idea what's going on. Then we edit it to make them look like idiots, and the show revolves around cheap animation and the awkward banter of the three leads.

That show was Space Ghost Coast to Coast—the absurdist animated talkshow that launched Adult Swim, and effectively ushered in the alternative animation renaissance of the 1990s. It ran for ten years, from 1994 to 2004.

Recently, lead animator of Coast to Coastand voice of Zorak and Moltar, C. Martin Croker passed away at age 54. Croker was one of those cult figures who had a finger in so much of the great alt-comedy wave of the past 25 years. A true cult hero.

It got me thinking on the legacy of Coast to Coast, and its impact on me and modern comedy.

I was ten when my parents got swindled into getting Foxtel. Already a TV junkie, I began to flood my life with back-to-back cartoons: Ren and Stimpy, Animaniacs, Courage the Cowardly Dog, etc. My eyes were decidedly square.

But it was late night Friday's on Cartoon Network that entranced me. For an hour or so, there was a little block of programs called "Adult Swim." There were only four shows—Sealab, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, The Brak Show, and the show that kicked the night off, Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

This animation block shifted something deep within me. I'd never seen anything like it. This wasn't South Park or The Simpsons. There was no moralizing, there was barely a plot. Instead there was this confused superhero asking David Byrne if he was "having trouble with his power bands"—with probing follow ups like "what do you mean by 'it'?". Adult Swim was wild, it was radical, it was pure, it was everything I wanted to do with my life.

Coast to Coast had punk sewn into its very aesthetic. As animator, Croker was a genius. It was his idea to repurpose the one off villains of the original Hannah Barbera cartoon Space Ghost (1966–1968) as the shows erstwhile sidekicks. The bronze age of TV sitcom and adventure cartoons of the 1960s was defined by horrid frame rates, plagiarized character design, tacky merchandising, and cost-cutting animation techniques (think the looping backgrounds of The Jetsons).

Croker, along with show's creator and producer Mike Lazzo, understood the parodic potential of all this—Coast to Coast looked cheap but that just heightened the trippy tension. The contrast between seeing (then) box office megastar Jim Carrey on a show that looked like it was made by propagandists from some dictatorship was palpable.

Space Ghost himself couldn't have had more than four default movements, one of which was to "blast" his guest with his laser arms. The limitations added to this unbearable feeling of nothingness—the constant hum of offscreen "space electronics" and the loud blinks of Zorak all muddled together to make a show that was as much lo-fi zine as it was Braque collage.

Coast to Coast was alternative "anti-comedy" at its absolute best. Today, you can see its influence everywhere. The entire Adult Swim cannon—from Harvey Birdman to Tom Goes to the Mayor—owes everything to this show. Coast to Coast turned Adult Swim into the alt empire it now is. Aqua Teen and The Brak Show were both spinoffs of the show. You wouldn't have Tim and Eric, Rick and Morty, Adventure Time, or Eric Andre without it.

In a 2012 interview, Andre told the Huffington Post, "I rented as many seasons I could get my hands on and did a Space Ghost marathon by myself in my house, just so I could absorb as much Space Ghost as I could."

And if you think Andre's treatment of celebrities is cruel and unusual, you should really get a load of the gulag torture chamber that is a Space Ghost interview. Celebrities were placed in a black room, facing a camera, where an ear speaker would pipe in the dulcet tones of George Lowe (Space Ghost). The confused stars (i.e. Willie Nelson) would struggle to form answers about oxygen and their art. Not that it mattered, as the interviews were cut up in editing, they were made to look like flummoxed and often psychotic fools, locked in an antagonistic back and forth with the erstwhile ghost and his Mantis bandleader.

Andre is great at terrifying his guests, but in Coast to Coast you'd see the looming existential crises fall upon them. It's a Samuel Beckett play meets E! News. The show was basically saying, "Your star will fall, you will be nothing, you know this because you are here" and in that daunting realization was great and agitating TV.

There's never been such a good deconstruction of celebrity and celebrity culture. Unlike Eric Andre or Hannibal Buress, Space Ghost and friends were immune to fame. They lived in space. They didn't "get" people. They weren't going to be cherished, except by weirdos like me. They didn't care if you were Hulk Hogan, and they wouldn't care if you were Kim Kardashian. They only cared if you were getting enough oxygen.

Croker's legacy as animator, writer, and voice artist, is tied up in this aggravated anti-consumer ethos. These shows never sought an audience. They were a beacon for freaks and weirdos, and they knew that we'd come. And we did. Adult Swim and its outsider influence looms large over not just modern animation, but modern comedy as a whole.

Croker may have died an obscure cult figure, but the legacy of Coast to Coast, and his other Adult Swim projects carry on, sometimes imperceptibly, in this galaxy and somewhere into the next.

Follow Patrick Marlborough on Twitter.

When Hillary Clinton declared at a high-dollar fundraiser earlier this month that half of Donald Trump's supporters belong in a "basket of deplorables" and are thus "irredeemable," it was widely depicted as some sort of extemporaneous gaffe. She immediately launched into crisis-control mode, expressing regret for using the word "half"; her own running mate even rebuked the remark. But Hillary's proclamation wasn't a slip of the tongue or verbal miscue—it was a very deliberate echo of a preacherly politicking style that the Clintons have honed over the course of decades. Their MO, now as ever, is to heap scorn on ordinary Americans for harboring unenlightened opinions while diverting attention from the structural factors which coalesced to sour folks against the status quo.

The "deplorables" diatribe was an intentional denunciation, one that Clinton had reportedly rehearsed over the summer time and time again at donor confabs. Apparently the wealthy elites who flock to such events were impressed by the quip, so much so that Hillary deemed it ready to try out in public. So she rattled it off again, this time with reporters present.

"Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it" is how Hillary diagnosed the Trump-supporting average Joe who, in her rather un-Christian assessment, is wholly "irredeemable." (Speaking of homophobia, Hillary herself didn't officially endorse same-sex marriage till 2013. Was she too consigned to a "basket" until just three years ago?)

Hillary's sneer has been likened to the Barack Obama comment at a San Francisco fundraiser in 2008 in which he posited that "bitter" working-class voters tend to "cling to their guns and religion." Clunky as Obama's observation might have been, it was fundamentally descriptive in nature—not necessarily accusatory. By contrast, Clinton's remarks were an explicit attack, not on the forces which gave rise to widespread anxieties and sometimes fuel prejudice, but on the voters themselves.

Bill Clinton used the same shtick back when he was in office. After the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, there was a nationwide scare over the alleged ascendance of right-wing militias. As his wife would do years later with the so-called "alt-right," Bill gave the small cohort of angry, marginalized troublemakers an unwarranted amount of attention, upbraiding them in a May 6, 1995 speech. "There is nothing patriotic about... pretending you can hate your government but love your country," Clinton declared.

In addition to gifting tiny fringe groups a signal boost and vindicating their over-inflated conceptions of themselves, this tactic also elevates a new Great Enemy in the national consciousness—scattered groups of armed separatists in the 90s, deplorables today. Both have associations with alienated whites, and so can be safely demonized without offending powerful monied interest groups or the liberal commentariat.

This tactic is distinct from mere partisanship. The Clintons operate best when they can "triangulate" themselves into the center of the American political gravity. In the space of less than a year, Hillary has gone from proudly calling Republicans her avowed enemies to announcing that she'll #actually be their savior. Last week, she pledged to aid in the GOP's post-election self-realization efforts, and help them to understand why they are fundamentally "better than Donald Trump." If you are a DC Republican, Clinton will welcome you to her governing coalition and may invite you to speak at the Democratic National Convention; if you're a "coal person" Bill Clinton will excoriate your friends and loved ones.

In 2008, Hillary made noises about how important it was for Democrats to win the votes of impoverished whites, bragging that she had more support than Obama among "hard-working Americans, white Americans" and "whites... who had not completed college." According to her back then, "These are the people you have to win if you're a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that."

Yet Clinton's 2016 primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, outperformed Clinton among poor whites, most notably in deep Appalachian West Virginia but also in places like northern California. Chalking this up to the moral turpitude of the poor is a copout—Obama ran much better among white men without a college degree in 2012 than Clinton is currently polling, and Trump may well win the heavily white, heavily distressed second congressional district of Maine purely for this reason. Obama, "clinging" comment aside, took pains to speak about the ails of working-class whites with nuance and empathy. The following passage from his much-heralded March 2008 "race speech" is worth recounting today:

"Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience—as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero-sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time. Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation."

The Clinton operation may believe that overtly shunning poor whites is sound electoral strategy, on the assumption that minorities and college-educated voters will come out to the polls in support of Hillary's "deplorable" attacks. But this approach could also backfire, in that it amplifies her pre-existing reputation as being the favored candidate of smarmy elites. By focusing single-mindedly on the ungraceful attitudes of some Trump supporters, rather than proposing ways to ameliorate the decades of discontent which caused them to reject ordinary political norms, Hillary is taking quite a gamble.

Meanwhile, Trump's assertion that the system is "rigged" appeals not just to those white voters Obama identified as being resentful of the global economy and the DC elite, but also Sanders voters who may feel the same things for different reasons. In one recent Economist/YouGov poll, only 52 percent Democratic primary voters who backed Sanders planned to cast a ballot for Clinton (15 percent said they'd go with Trump, while others favored third-party candidates).

In its obliviousness and elitism, the Hillary campaign has come to resemble the "Remain" campaign in the United Kingdom, which lost after a critical mass of working-class Britons determined that the European Union wasn't the glorious civilizational triumph they'd been told. "Betrayal, grievance, dispossession: these were surely what counted for most," wrote the journalist Ian Jack in the Guardian.

In August, the movement of anti-elite anger officially went global when Nigel Farage, one of the leaders of the Brexit campaign, spoke before a Trump rally in Mississippi. "If the ordinary, decent people are prepared to stand up and fight for what we believe in, we can overcome the big banks, we can overcome the multinationals," Farage declared. "We reached those people who've been let down by modern global corporatism." Americans who take heed of those words might be a little rough around the edges, but they're far from "irredeemable." They're just fed up.

Follow Michael Tracey on Twitter.

All art by Zoe Ligon

The turn of the millennium was a fertile time for pornographic experimentation. This was the era that brought us tropes like the creampie and cumswapping . Many of the more novel innovations of this period, like adult diaper fetish or giantess pornos, quickly turned into niches tucked away in the far corners of the internet. Bukkake, however, managed to sear itself into American culture, erotic and beyond.

A Japanese term meaning "the act of splashing," "bukkake" can refer to a style of noodles. But more often than not, it refers to a sexual act in which a group of men stand around one woman and beat their dicks off until they jizz onto her face.

Some spurious tales claim the act had roots in a shaming ritual for adulterous women in medieval Japan. This origin story certainly resonates with the common perception that bukkake videos are all about dominating and denigrating women with a wave of liquid masculinity for twisted, chauvinistic pleasure. But the act actually shows up for the first time in the historical record in 1986 with the release of the Japanese porno Mascot Note. Porn historians tend to agree that it (like tentacle porn) was a workaround to depict some kind of sexual pleasure in a country where censorship laws required the pixilation of genitals.

Yet for all we know about the rise of bukkake, the story of when and how it came to America is pretty hazy. It's even less clear why, once introduced in the United States, which wasn't dealing with the same cultural baggage or censorship issues as Japan, it became fairly popular. There are almost 11,500 videos on Pornhub right now tagged with "bukkake"—almost 10 times as many as the number of videos tagged as "futanari," another Japanese fetish involving one or more characters who present as women but turn out to have (and vigorously use) male genetalia. And many mainstream porn stars from Sasha Gray to Riley Reid have either done a full-on bukkake or a variation of it, like a blowbang or gangbang ending in a group cumshot.

Finding bukkake's exact American debut is impossible; Japanese videos floated to the US from the 1980s onward. And by 1997, a Western bukkake series called German Goo Girls was already coming our way via Europe. But many in the industry, like Jeff Vanzetti, the founder of IAFD.com (porn's IMDB) and perhaps the closest thing to an encyclopedic industry archivist, believe the first bukkake film to really popularize the fetish in this country was "American Bukkake," a series released in 1998 by Jeff Mike's JM Productions, the year that porn historian Brian Watson claims the term "bukkake" first started to spike in American media.

Although his company is still fairly active, Mike has been out of the spotlight and (for the most part) the industry for almost a decade following high-profile obscenity cases in the early 2000s that were linked in part to his bukkake productions. The obscenity charges were eventually dropped in both cases, although only after about a year of legal wrangling and extreme stress. VICE recently caught up with Mike. Here's the man in his own words sharing his recollections on how he became acquainted with bukkake, why he thought it was special, and how its popularity developed in the US.

I had my own company within a larger distribution company in the 1990s. They also distributed movies for different people like Rodney Moore. He came to my office one day and handed me a VHS tape from Japan that was a bukkake. I watched it, and I was blown away.

I'm not turned off by cumshots. I'm not exactly turned on by them, either. But this was just so different. It was so easy, yet it was like a train wreck. You almost can't take your eyes off of it. The people's genitals were pixelated. I thought, Wow, the Japanese work with a lot of censorship against them, yet they come up with these unique, creative ideas and manage to pull them off .

I sat on the idea for a while. I had a line of vignette videos, Perverted Stories . I figured: Nothing needs to fit in. So let's try a bukkake scene just to see what happens . This was Perverted Stories 21 in 1998. We called the scene "Bukkake Boys." I don't remember how many guys we brought in—I want to say 15. We just had the girl sit there, and the guys ejaculated on her. And I got bombarded with fan mail after this film came out. They would say, Hey, this is awesome, you guys need to do more of this ! So that's why I decided to do the series "American Bukkake." The first one of those we put out in 1999, and it was pretty much an overnight success.

My company is fan-driven. I never did it for the money—although that was nice. I've been a fan for a long time, and I thought a lot of the product that was coming out was just generic. I come from a punk rock background. Pushing the limits and not fitting in, I always thought, was a good thing. And that's just the way that I did it. It wasn't necessarily to shock anybody. It did, but that wasn't the goal. I just wanted to put out stuff that was interesting enough to have my name on it.

Bukkake was difficult to shoot and really expensive compared to the other things that were coming out at the time. The first time we used the B-grade guys, or guys who we shot all the time that kind of did us a favor. They shot this scene for us at less than their normal rate. But over time, it got easier. We put an ad in LA Weekly to get guys. We ran it twice a month, and we set up a bukkake hotline—it was just a phone number that somebody manned, and he would call them back and tell them all where this bukkake shoot was. It seemed very underground to me. It was cool because the fans got to be a part of something that they loved. They would tell us something that they wanted to see or what they liked about it and what they didn't like about it. So we kept adjusting as we kept shooting. I think that's why we had the longevity—still to this day we sell a lot of them.

Art by Zoe Ligon

The Japanese bukkake was much better than what we originally shot, because we only had ten or 15 guys. It's got to be 20, 30, 40. But our shoots kept growing. The fans would say, We want more guys. People would tell their friends. It was like a punk show. Only certain people knew where it was. Somebody would call somebody else, and it would snowball. We had to change the locations every time because the studios would get pissed at all the guys hanging out in their parking lots, and it probably looked scary to them. A lot of the people in the movies were really cool, though.

When you approach the girls about a scene that's never been done before, that's kind of hard to explain, they just look at you like you're stupid. But after we shot a few of these things, girls were actually coming to us. Maybe their fans were telling them, We want to see you do this. There are some girls who fantasize about multiple men wanting them and wanting to orgasm on them, too. So, after awhile, I had a waiting list. I can't say that about anything else we've put out.

[Editor's Note: The more movies they made and the more fans asked for more extreme content, the more Mike and his team were pushed to invent sub-fetishes within the bukkake genre, at least one of which turned into its own distinct, independent fetish: gokkun, or cum drinking. ]

It's hard to remember how I came up with half of this shit. If something outrageous came to mind, I would write it down and save it until the next bukkake shoot. The cum bomb is the first thing we did. [ Editor's Note: Think a condom-water-balloon full of ejaculate .] But it got kind of boring, so we had to come up with new ideas. Some came from fans and some came from me and my director, Jim Powers. We did one once where the girl was wearing goggles, but we took the lenses out so the cum pooled up in her eyes. It was intense.

We tried a lot of different things, like having them cum on food and having the girls eat the food.

I said to my director, "I wonder if we could cook into a scrambled egg–type mixture." And we did that. If it was something that looked good and the fans responded positively to, then we continued in that direction. It seemed to me like the more disgusting it was, the better it was for the fans. I guess disgusting is different for everybody, and for them, it wasn't. It was bliss.

WATCH: The Enduring and Erotic Power of Quicksand on Screen

A lot of it, too, was what I thought once the movie was edited. If I thought it looked good, we would keep going with it. With the food stuff, people wanted it, but I thought it just didn't look right. I know a lot of people do stuff like that now on these clip sites, but I didn't care for it.

Then we started doing gokkun. We did our first one of those in 2006. We had made 20 or 30 "American Bukkake" videos, so it was getting harder to come up with ideas. Most of the scenes featured swallowing, because fans always wanted that. And I heard the word "gokkun" somewhere and thought, Oh shit, we can branch off and do American Gokkun with only swallowing and continue "American Bukkake" with only facials. If I could make two series, it's double the profits. We already had this core group of guys, so we went from shooting bi-weekly to weekly.

In the late 90s, early 2000s, that was kind of the trend, where every company was trying to outdo each other... I kept thinking that other people in the US were going to start making more bukkakes. But for the longest time, they didn't. I don't know why exactly that happened. There were a few companies that were starting to do it, but not in the same way. They couldn't get the people, so they'd call it a bukkake, but it only had five or six guys. But when I got busted in Los Angeles for obscenity, pretty much everybody backed off bukkake, and I kind of owned that category for a long time.

People have this image of pornographers being outlaws or people who have balls. It's really the opposite. They're a bunch of fucking pussies. They follow what everybody else is doing and do it as safe as possible, which I never did. I never thought, Will I get in trouble for doing this ? I'd just do it. I figured, I live in the United States, it's a free country.

Many porn companies, they're just doing it for the money. And that's not me. I mean, I loved the money. But it's not the most important thing. When you put your name on something, it should stand for what you are. I cared. It's funny, because I don't anymore. But man, did I back then. Even when I was in Los Angeles, I never paid any attention to what other people were doing or what was popular. Our tagline for the company was, "We don't follow trends. We create them."

"I didn't want to be just another porno company putting out the same crap as everybody else. I wanted people to feel like they got their money's worth." —Jeff Mike

I'm totally turned off of the porn industry today. There really isn't any money in it anymore. I still get emails form people begging me to do more bukkakes and gokkuns but... you can't sell enough of them because everything's pirated. As soon as you put it out there, it's up on the internet, and everybody's getting it on these tube sites for free. So as much as I'd love to keep doing it, I'm not going to spend and lose money to make like three people happy.

And I'm not inspired anymore. So if I'm not inspired, I don't want to put out anything new.

It blows my mind that these 20-something producers in the US are doing stuff that I helped pioneer. I don't know if they watched some of my movies or if they're just coming up with these ideas 20 years later. But I feel like we've inspired a lot of people a lot. I don't know if that's good or bad. And I never look at it that way. I was just trying to create something interesting that people hadn't seen before. I didn't want to be just another porno company putting out the same crap as everybody else. I wanted people to feel like they got their money's worth. There was nothing more aggravating for me when I was a porn fan then renting a VHS tape and end up being like, Fuck, this sucks, I just spent $5 on this . I didn't want my shit to be like that. I wanted people to want more, and we were very successful at that.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.